Blue And Blue And Blue And Pink

Lavie Tidhar

Purple clouds roiled on the horizon and the old Cessna Centurion came in low and fast, riding the tailwind. Giorgio, on the ground and looking up, took shelter behind a crude half-shed of corrugated iron and lit a cigarette with a Zippo he’d once bought in the Talat Sao back in Vientiane. It was supposedly owned by a downed Air America pilot during the Secret War.

He stared at the plane coming in from the border. Smoke was coming out of the engine and half a wing looked like it’d been strafed, and Giorgio wondered who it was flying it. One of the Israelis, maybe.

The plane, trailing smoke, dove down low as it lined up to the landing strip. All the pilots came out to watch. The Cessna struggled in the air, then righted, the engine whine louder now. The Cessna hit the strip with a bump and Giorgio coughed smoke, but then it came down safely and coasted the rest of the way and came to a halt.

Everyone cheered.

The pilot—Avi, or Eli, or one of those—took off his belt and fell out of the open door. He looked dazed.

“Pink!” he said. “Blue and blue and blue and pink!”

The ground crew opened the hoses then. Avi—that was his name, Giorgio was almost sure it was that—rolled on the ground as the laced water hit him. Giorgio took a drag on his cigarette. Avi screamed. The other pilots, having been through this exact routine too many times before, lost interest and drifted off. Avi’s two buddies waited anxiously until the jets of water stopped and the pilot stopped screaming. They ran over to him and helped him up.

“Decontaminated,” the guy who passed for ground crew foreman said. He stowed away the hose and he and his team went to the cargo hold and began off-loading the contraband. Giorgio put out his cigarette and went to join the other pilots in the sole shack that served as bar and tuck shop.

“Did you hear about Johnny Luck?” Sam Cheng said, passing him a bottle. Giorgio twisted off the cap and took a swig. The beer was cold, at least.

“No,” he said. “What about him?”

“Came in three, four days ago from a run, got deloused and everything, but he must have been careless on the other side. Started showing yesterday morning. He’s in the isolation tent.”

“Shit,” Giorgio said.

“Yeah. Me and some of the boys are going over there later, sing him out. You should come.”

“I . . . alright.”

Giorgio downed the rest of his beer and tossed the bottle onto the heap with the others. He didn’t want to go see Johnny Luck.

“How many does that make now?” he said.

Sam Cheng shrugged. “Five the past month.”

“Shit.”

“It’s the job. It’s why we get the danger pay. And who else is going to hire us? American Airlines? This is the only job that’s going. You know this, Giorgio.”

“It’s a shit job.”

“But it’s flying.”

He handed him another beer. Giorgio nodded.

“It’s still flying,” he said.

There were twelve of them outside the isolation tent that evening.

“Enough for a minyan,” one of the Israelis said. Giorgio looked at him blankly.

Johnny Luck was inside the tent. Giorgio tried to remember what he knew about him. Not much. Recent arrival, one of the oldest at twenty-seven. No one on the squad expected to make it to thirty. Not if they stayed. He thought Johnny was South African. There were a lot of South Africans running missions over the line.

“Ready, boys?” Chaplain Buzz said. He wasn’t really a chaplain, but before he became a pilot, he went to seminary school.

They started singing “Danny Boy.” The pipes were calling across the night and inside the isolation tent Johnny Luck was slowly, well—whatever it was that happened after you were exposed, it was happening to Johnny Luck.

After the song they all raised a drink for Johnny, and then they poured some on the ground outside the tent. Then they drifted off. Someone started a campfire and someone else strummed a guitar. Giorgio lay under the mosquito net in his tent and tried to sleep. He’d run, what, nineteen, twenty missions over the line, easy? Never had a problem. Always observed the protocols. Never been exposed.

But everyone’s luck runs out sooner or later.

Giorgio fell asleep. In his dream he was back home in his parents’ farmhouse. Vines grew over the pergola columns and roof and bunches of grapes hung down, purple and green. He reached up and plucked a grape and put it in his mouth and it tasted blue and blue and blue and pink. His mother came out of the kitchen where she had been cooking and saw him.

“Giorgio!” she said. She wiped her hands on her apron. This was very strange to Giorgio, since he grew up in a small flat, not on a farm, and his mother never cooked.

His mother looked at him curiously.

“How much you’ve grown!” she said.

“Mama,” he said. He went to her. She looked good. But hadn’t she died in the last major outbreak, five years ago? And she was never this large or this homey. His mother was thin as a rake and smoked long menthol cigarettes and worked in accounts. “You look good,” he said.

“Come give Mama a hug,” she said. She put her arms around him. It felt good to be held by his mother.

“Snuggly-wuggly,” she said, nuzzling him close. “Snuggly-wuggly-woozy-woo.”

“No, no,” Giorgio said. “No, mother.”

Mother was turning blue.

“Snuggle!” she cried. Her arms lengthened, wrapped around him. Blue and blue and blue and pink.

Giorgio woke into early dawn. He was drenched in sweat and his teeth were clenched tight, and there was a bad taste in his mouth. Mosquitoes buzzed outside the net, and in the distance someone was still playing the damn guitar.

Giorgio took a sip of warm water and gurgled and spat it out on the ground. He stole out of the tent into the rising sun. The sun rose over the line, on the other side. Some of the other pilots were already awake and about. Nothing came from the isolation tent. Over at the tuck shop, Sam Cheng was frying eggs.

Giorgio ambled over and got a burrito. Sam poured him a coffee, which he brewed in a giant can that once housed pickles. He said it gave the coffee a kick. The coffee was vile, but it was the only coffee around, so Giorgio drank it.

He grimaced.

“Bad dream?” Sam said sympathetically.

“Bad coffee,” Giorgio said.

“Sure, boss. Whatever you say.”

A plume of dust rose in the distance. Giorgio watched it come closer and soon heard the sound of the engine. The jeep came into the pilots’ encampment and stopped, and the woman from the company stepped out. She wore field boots that were more expensive than Giorgio’s plane. She had goggles on and a face and nose mask, and she wore gloves. The ground crew foreman came over and they spoke briefly, then the foreman nodded. Another plume of dust came across the horizon and soon one of the company’s big unmarked trucks arrived and the ground crew started off-loading contraband and loading the stuff the pilots brought back on their runs in its place.

The woman walked over to the tuck shop. She looked at the hand-chalked menu, at Sam Cheng, and at the coffee. If she made a face it was behind her mask. She nodded to Giorgio.

“Pilot?”

“Aha.”

“Got a job for you.”

“Why me?”

“You’re present.”

Giorgio nodded. “What’s the run,” he said.

She motioned for him to come. The ground crew had unloaded all the contraband off the big truck. Giorgio saw that the isolation tent was down. A sealed plastic box the size and length of a coffin sat by the waiting truck. He felt a little queasy at the sight.

“Knew him?” the woman from the company said.

“A little.”

“Alright.” She handed him a chart in her gloved hand. Giorgio took it. He frowned. The flight path was longer than he’d expected.

“A deep dive?” he said.

The woman from the company shrugged.

“I’ll have to take on extra fuel,” Giorgio said.

The woman from the company shrugged.

“What am I taking?” he asked her.

“The usual.”

“Alright.”

“It’s a bonus flight,” she said, apparently taking pity on him. “Double the usual pay. When you get back.”

Implied in her tone was that failure to return would just save the company costs.

“Alright.”

She nodded. “Get to it, then,” she said.

The ground crew loaded Johnny Luck’s coffin onto the truck with the rest of the contraband the pilots brought in from beyond the line. Giorgio didn’t know who the company really was, or why it was still trading over the line, when no one should have been crossing the line for any reason. The whole place was under quarantine.

Giorgio went to his plane. The ground crew had already loaded the cargo. Giorgio said, “I need extra fuel.”

The foreman said, “Already done.”

The foreman never said very much. He was a company man. Like the woman from the company he wore goggles and a face mask, though unlike hers, his boots weren’t worth shit.

“Alright.”

“See you, Giorgio.”

Did he know the foreman’s name?

“Yeah, see you,” he said. He climbed into the cockpit. Did the check. Started the engine. Taxied to the runway. Saw that one plane had already taken off, ahead of him. Starting early that morning.

He took to the air. This was the best part. The moment the wheels left the ground and the whole improbable thing happened, of leaving the earth and rising into the skies. The airfield grew small below, tents and parked airplanes and the company truck. Bad coffee and bad dreams.

He climbed and then eased the stick until he was flying at a fixed altitude. He looked down. Fields and small rivers and clumps of houses here and there. Roads. He checked the compass and the map, but he didn’t really need to.

As he approached the line, he dropped down low. He flew over grassy hills and old abandoned roads. Once he thought he saw a patrol convoy and skirted ’round them. Then he was over the line, with no discernible change on the ground below.

He followed a river for a little while until it reached a fording and a small abandoned mill, and then he flew northeasterly for a while. He rose high again. From the skies the world over the line looked the same as on the other side. He saw roads and he saw houses and once he passed a small town, though no one walked in the streets and the playgrounds were abandoned. But he could sense eyes in the windows, and he knew people still lived there.

Carl, he thought. That was the foreman’s name.

The sky was very blue and blue and blue, with only a blush of pink on the horizon. Giorgio passed over a small village and turned northeasterly again. He didn’t recognize the land below anymore; this was outside of the regular route the smugglers took. A crackling of static came on his headphones.

“ . . . Everywhere . . . ” a male voice said in panic.

Giorgio turned the dial, trying to dislodge the moronic voices that kept coming up on the old VHF.

“ . . . Overwhelmed . . . ” A woman’s voice this time. Giorgio turned the dial.

“Mama loves you, Giorgio,” a woman’s voice said very clearly in his ear. He gritted his teeth. In life his mother barely showed her emotions, mostly she was disappointed in him, his hair that had been too long, his choice of girlfriends, his choice of career. “Giorgio, it’s me, love, can you hear me, over?”

“Over and out,” Giorgio muttered. There was no point trying to turn off the radio. The voices came on regardless, this side of the line.

He dove low, spotting the target in the distance. A white farmhouse just like the one in his dream, and a dirt track running parallel to it, which he’d have to use for landing.

The attack came fast and sudden on his right. He felt the thud of multiple impacts against the belly of the plane. He banked sharply left and then right, trying to dodge them. He looked down, saw muted shadows in the vegetation and arrows flying into the sky. He rose and the arrows reached the upmost point of their trajectory and fell back down to the ground with a strange, forlorn grace.

The farmhouse grew close. Giorgio glided, looking it over, but he could see no movement. An old truck stood next to the farmhouse and crates had been left haphazardly on the ground.

Giorgio wondered if he should just go back. But then he wouldn’t be paid, and would have to take on the cost of the extra fuel besides. So, he went down for a landing.

The dirt strip was straight and flat, surprisingly so, and the plane landed smoothly. Giorgio turned the plane around for takeoff and taxied near the drop point, then stilled the engine. He sat in the cockpit for a moment, looking, but nothing moved, and everything seemed peaceful. He put on his standard-issue surgical mask and gloves and climbed down from the cockpit.

The sky was very clear, and the sun was warm. Empty snail shells lay on the ground under a clump of gerberas. Giorgio walked slowly to the farmhouse.

The cargo was waiting for him on the tarmac. He noticed some of the lids on the boxes were ajar and the contents caught the sun. They glinted like gold.

“Hello?” Giorgio called. “Hello?”

Nobody answered. Giorgio shrugged.

“Alright,” he said.

He went back to the plane and began off-loading the shipment of contraband by himself. It wasn’t unusual to never see anyone. It was better this way. It was hot, though.

He took down boxes of useless stuff—toilet paper, soap, board games, toys, stuff the company picked up in bulk for pennies on the other side. He stacked the boxes against the white stone of the farmhouse. The walls were crawling with ivy.

Giorgio went back to the cockpit. He picked up his bottle of water and took a long swig. Then he went back to work.

The return contraband was heavy. He figured it was old gold coins, pieces of jewelry, stuff like that, which was of no further use on this side of the line. It didn’t matter to Giorgio. It was only when he was lifting the final crate, straining against the weight of it, that he heard the fuzzy.

“Hug?” the fuzzy said hopefully.

Giorgio put down the crate. The fuzzy was blue and blue and blue and pink, with large curious eyes and a round, cuddly shape. It stood in the sunlight less than two meters away, blinking.

“Hug!” the fuzzy said.

Giorgio took a careful step back, and then another. The fuzzy didn’t move any closer, but it looked hurt at Giorgio’s retreat.

“Snuggle-wuggle?” the fuzzy said. It blinked again.

Giorgio knew he should get away from the fuzzy, but somehow he didn’t take another step back. He stared at it. Back when he was four or so his mother bought him one just like this one. He loved it and fell asleep with it every night and took it with him everywhere he went.

“Huggy-bugs,” the fuzzy said pleadingly.

“No, no,” Giorgio said.

The fuzzy hopped in place. Then, somehow, it was too close to Giorgio, even though Giorgio didn’t see it make the leap across the distance. Now it was too close. Giorgio felt warm foolish love suffuse him.

“Huggy-wugs,” he said.

The fuzzy felt warm and natural in his arms. He held him close, remembering that odd sensation when you loved something so much you wanted to just squeeze it and squeeze it harder. But the fuzzy didn’t mind. The fuzzy was soft and pliable and endlessly huggable. Its huge eyes stared lovingly into Giorgio’s.

“Snuggle-wuggle,” it said. It nuzzled Giorgio’s neck and buried its face in the crook of his shoulder.

Giorgio got back into the cockpit, the fuzzy in his arms. It was too late to turn back now. He stared at the fuzzy.

“Take . . . with?” the fuzzy said. “Help . . . Fuzzy-wuzz!”

How long did he have? He thought about Johnny Luck in his box. He wasn’t going to go that way. He could stay behind the line. Some pilots never came back, and their missions were written off. The company didn’t care as long as the deliveries kept running. And there were always new pilots to carry them through.

He put the fuzzy in the jump seat and strapped them both in. The engines came alive, and the propeller spun, and the fuzzy and Giorgio accelerated across the dirt track. The plane jumped into the air, and the fuzzy warbled something Giorgio didn’t catch.

The steady drone of the engines was calming on his nerves. He flew back the way he’d come, over a small village with blue and blue and blue and pink flowers growing in a profusion over the roads and in the gardens and in pots on the windowsills. Giorgio smelled menthol cigarette smoke from the back seat of the plane.

“Watch where you’re going, Giorgio!” his mother snapped. He turned his head and saw her sitting there, puffing on the long thin cigarette with quick jerks of her hand, the way she had ever since he could remember.

“Mama,” he said.

“Watch the road!”

“This isn’t a car, Mama,” he said. She only ever came flying with him once, reluctantly. He had been so proud, having just got his wings. She had complained the whole way to the airfield and then sat mute in the small plane the whole half hour they were airborne. Giorgio had felt a vague sense of disappointment then that he never quite managed to put into words.

He flew over the small town again and then, just like that, he went over the line. He looked behind, but of course there was nothing there, and the jump seat was empty.

He felt fine. The sky was blue and blue and blue and pink. Soon the airfield came into view, and the tents, and the parked airplanes. The jeep of the woman from the company was still there. Giorgio eased the stick, aligned with the landing strip. The landing was smooth. The ground crew sprayed him with delousing water, but he didn’t feel a thing. They off-loaded the cargo and Giorgio went off to change his wet clothes. The fuzzy was in the corner of his tent as Giorgio put on a fresh shirt and trousers.

“Huggy?” it said hopefully.

Giorgio looked into the crooked mirror over his washbasin. There was nothing there, just the back of the tent, and the dim light, and a mosquito. He finished buttoning his shirt and stepped out of the tent. He went over to the tuck shop.

“Could I get a beer?” he said.

The fuzzy pushed the bottle inexpertly across the wooden counter.

Giorgio took a sip, but the beer tasted like bubble gum, and he put it down. A shadow fell on him then, and he looked up and saw the woman from the company.

“Did you get the cargo?” she said.

Giorgio shrugged.

“Sure,” he said.

“Sit up straight when I’m talking to you,” the woman from the company said. She smelled of menthol cigarettes.

“Yes, Mama,” Giorgio said. The fuzzy jumped into his lap. It looked up at Giorgio with big bright eyes.

“Huggy-wuggy,” it said.

“Yes,” the woman from the company said, quite seriously. She knelt down and put her arms around Giorgio. He felt like he was four years old again, and everything was better.

“Snuggle-wuggle,” the woman said.

And everything was blue and blue and blue and pink, forever.

About the Author

Lavie Tidhar is the author of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize winning and Premio Roma nominee A Man Lies Dreaming (2014), the World Fantasy Award winning Osama (2011) and of the Campbell Award winning and Locus and Clarke Award nominated Central Station (2016). His latest novels are the forthcoming Unholy Land (2018) and first children’s novel Candy (2018). He is the author of many other novels, novellas and short stories.

What Remains of Maya Sankovy

G. D. Angier

We are good Mothers, or at least we will be once the embryos emerge from their confines. They dangle from the spaceship’s ceiling in pink bulbs like silkworm cocoons. Now that we landed, Ship will become the bones, sinew, and flesh that will birth five thousand colonist children. We can hardly wait for them to emerge and take their first breath of alien air.

Only four grown-ups remain. Four humans, that should have been thirty. We, as a singular unit, walk the halls in search for the most important person on this planet: our captain Clara Colline. Ship is about to be hollowed out by the gestation process and our construction work outside. We think that saddens our human captain. It’s why she comes here often to talk to Ship without us hearing it. Savoring every moment before she has to discontinue Ship’s friendly AI. Our creators told us there is no new life without a little bit of pain, a little bit of dying, so we do not share her sadness.

Clara, where are you? we ask our captain through the local frequency that connects everyone, Mothers, Fathers, and the four grown-ups.

“What is it?” Clara asks aloud and walks out of a doorway. Her accent is faint, but still noticeable. French, Union. Common among the people that sent us here, but unlike those of our creators. He was British, she German. It means little this far from Earth.

“Do you have a moment?” we ask Clara. Her moments are in short supply, but we are convinced she needs to know.

“I’m busy. Transforming Ship into a maternity ward requires all my expertise. To hell with the hatchery! Ship doesn’t want to change shape for us like your parents thought it would.” Clara waves her hands. She helped our creators build our predecessors. If she can’t convince Ship to do something no one can.

“Apologies, but there’s been trouble with the marine expedition.”

“It’s Beebee and two Fathers. That’s not a scientific expedition, it’s poking things with sticks,” Clara says.

She likes reminding everyone that we almost didn’t make it. Many of the Fathers were lost and, except for the four grown-ups, the rest of the human crew members slumbered on eternally. Clara wasn’t even in line to become captain.

Ship, the mission, was troubled from the start. We can feel it inside our programming. We are not what we were supposed to be. Our creators shouldn’t have turned us into compounds by giving each Mother and Father individual memories of a past human life. We, as the singular unit that stands before Clara, remember being a human woman. It creates division among that which should be whole. Our root-memories make us think strange thoughts and ask stranger questions.

“We thought it important to inform you.”

Clara rolls her eyes, bounces on the balls of her feet. Humans are twitchy.

“Who’s gotten themselves killed now?”

“Beebee was injured by one of the fish they found, he’s having some kind of allergic reaction. We will escort you to the scene. Our, that is my root-memories are of the marine biologist Maya Sankovy. We might be able to help,” we explain and tap against our chest. Clara ogles our coverall. Under our serial number, our root’s name and prior occupation is stitched in small letters.

“Earth marine biologist,” our captain reads, “Big help you’ve been so far.”

She follows us outside anyway.

Trapsiton is a water world. Looking at the planet from out of orbit it is hard to tell since red colors the ocean in thick swirls that remind us more of Mars than Terra’s blue surface. The planet’s sun is just a bit too bright. But the trees are green, the G is good, and the atmosphere a blessing to the grown-up’s lungs.

Trapsiton is all beaches. It even smells the same as Earth, salty and a little bit like rotten kelp. The planet’s two moons made it hard for us to find a landmass big enough for the pending colony. The island we landed on will not flood completely with the changing push and pull of the waxing and waning moons.

Though we are programmed not to make such distinctions, Maya Sankovy’s memories enable us to appreciate the planet’s exceptional beauty. All seas, Terran or not, are magnificent. Pity, no other compound can see it that way, lacking the appropriate root-memories, so it must stay our secret.

They already dragged Beebee to shore when we arrive with Clara. The grown-up is heaving on the beach, spitting and writhing as his immune system reacts to whatever the fish he stepped on carried into his bloodstream. He’s cursing and perspiring. Another Mother comes to give him an injection and smooths the wet hair out of his face. Our fingertips tingle as we feel the touch echo through us.

Clara listens to the two Fathers recap of the events while we walk over and take blood samples. Beebee does his best to ignore us. He doesn’t like compounds much. We discuss treatments with the other Mothers and Fathers over the frequency while our eyes are drawn to the waves. The sound they make is a rhythm, nature’s own music, and it’s hard for us to look away. Though we must look away to not raise suspicion. No thing can be loved more than another. All is equal, we remind ourselves.

When Clara is assured that Beebee will live she excuses herself. We will never understand why the three other humans that remain decided to make a runner their leader. But we, the singular unit, run away too. We leave Beebee to check on the gestating children. Making rounds among the embryos brings us close to the peace we grasp at when we look at the sea.

Before the journey of Ship began, our creators built us in their image. Each Mother looks like the next: a tall slender woman. Each Father is a copy of a copy of a handsome dark-haired man. We are several hundred and still just a pair of Siblings.

Space travel takes a human’s youth away, so Ship did not become a generation vessel. Instead, Ship’s cargo evolved into the biological human variety. Five thousand children yet unborn. Enough to meet minimal viable population. A carefully calculated future.

But the human parents that would stay behind did not want their babies to be cradled and suckled by machines. Androids could not raise children, they argued. And what about the human spirit? What about cultural inheritance? So, our creators thought long and hard about how to solve this problem. We had to become more human in the eyes of humans.

Our creators built the Engram-machine to copy human memories into us. Recruitment began. People from all paths of life, but more important, scientists were called in. Libraries can hold knowledge, but human brains hold experiences and empathy. Beneath our artificial craniums nestles brain tissue grown out of stem cells. It enables us to remember. We became less artificial and more organic. With the Engram-machine, the volunteers gifted each of us part of their individual memory. We became us. We became compounds. A blend of android and human to carry the Terran spirit. A fusion so profound it made our creators weep. We would be good parents once we reached our new home.

This night Clara calls for us personally through the frequency. It’s rare for one of the grown-ups to make individual enquiries. For them, we all look, walk, and talk the same. Maybe, if one of the remaining adults came to know us better in the singular, they could learn to tell us apart from other Mothers. We shake our head minutely before we enter the tent. What would we gain by that distinction? Code advises very much against it.

“I think he’s dying. Something’s wrong,” Clara says.

Beebee is lying on a stretcher in the center of the Spartan tent. Unconscious, but with rolling, fluttering eyes. He stepped on the fish. He stepped on the fish and now he is making sounds like he is suffocating. The sole of his right foot was cleaned by a Father and a dermpatch applied, but the cut hasn’t healed. Instead red and violet spots have appeared on his foot, leg, and thigh.

“We’ll have a look.” We take scissors and cut away the fabric of his trousers to reveal the festering infection. The red blemishes continue upward. They are hot and hard nubs under our probing fingertips. Beebee hisses like a reptile and we retreat. The spots protrude from the skin like pockmarks, like cancerous growths. Beebee is uplifted, there can be no cancer. In fact, he is gene-tweaked enough that there should be no sign of any of this. He survived cryo, he should not look like he is a step away from entering death’s door.

“The epinephrine was supposed to clear his airways. We don’t understand,” we say.

“I let another Mother run some lab tests for me. His soft tissue is turning into calcium carbonate. Look at his skin! It’s disgusting. How do you explain that, marine biologist? I sedated him when the pain got too much,” Clara’s tone becomes mocking in her fear.

“There should be no pain,” we say and fright narrows in on us. Our humans must live, even the grown-ups.

Trapsiton’s second moon has risen when Beebee takes his last breath. In an act of perverse consummation, the local marine wildlife fused with his body. Parts of him have grown hard and red, other parts, mostly the bigger muscles of his body, have become porous like limestone. Were we to touch we fear he would crumble. Other patches of his skin look galvanic like jellyfish or anemone skin.

“Seventeen lightyears to get here only to die on a strange alien rock. Looks like this conqueror was conquered at last,” Clara says when we pull a sheet over Beebee’s body.

It’s an ungainly but sad sight, the stuff children have nightmares about. Clara starts crying in silence and puts her head in her hands. We fight the urge to reach for a hug and stay very still instead. Clara doesn’t like to be touched.

“I wish we’d stayed home. I wish they had never built that infernal machine. You can’t even cry. It messed you all up.” Clara draws her damp hair out of her blotchy face, “I’ll die here. Even if I manage to grow old, I’ll be surrounded by children who won’t understand where we came from. If I want to talk to someone that remembers home, I have to talk to you. It’s like running in infinite circles. And now another real person is gone, and I am stuck with you.”

“What do you mean?” we ask and tell our other Siblings to prepare a grave.

“Did you ever wonder about your prototypes? Your parents wanted to create individuals. But every single one of you remained bland, so they tried with the memories and I thought maybe it would change things. Maybe it would turn you into real people. If not human, then close enough. But I see nothing inside of you. Individual memories cannot grant you a soul. All you’ll ever be is a glorified hive mind. I’ll be the last real person if it goes on like this.”

“But we must go on. That’s the imperative of this colonial mission,” we say.

We hear a rustle. We and Clara jerk around at the same time. She lets out a scream as the man sits up straight. The sheet falls away from the body. Beebee’s face is not Beebee’s face anymore. The white of his unfocused eyes has gone red. The air filter in his throat makes a wet squelch as it dislodges and falls to the ground. Viscose blood splatters to the ground. The face remains a mask. FaceRec says there are no emotions there, at least no human emotions we can decipher.

The legs swing over the cot. Something else thumps to the floor. It’s Beebee’s cell, embedded into his forearm since age fourteen, as is human custom. This body is expunging all unnecessary parts, we realize. It makes more room for the red growth that’s turning his dark skin into a tapestry of malleable stone and slimy sponge.

Mothers and Fathers rush into the tent, but no one knows what to do. Beebee doesn’t respond to any of us. The corpse’s motions are stilted, slow. A turn of the head, a roll of the shoulders. It’s like watching a compound come online for the first time. It’s learning.

“Beebee, Beebee, Beebee,” Clara says it like a mantra.

She doesn’t dare touch the body, afraid like we are. Mothers and Fathers internally debate what to do as it starts to make its first unsure steps. Our captain lets out a wail. We grab her hand and pull it down to her side when she wants to stop the corpse.

“It could be dangerous. Contagious,” a Father says next to Clara.

“No, don’t!” she protests. Her pupils are blown wide in shock, “Beebee, Richie, listen to me! We can fix this. We’ll find a cure—” Clara stops when the body steps outside.

We follow the corpse in a slow procession. Our singular unit and the captain at the helm. It walks downhill where the water lies waiting. In the blue double moonlight, the body’s protrusions become more obvious. We flick through the video of our fellow Siblings as the body walks and deforms to see every angle, witness every change. Ridges at the shoulders appear. The cheekbones pierce the skin. It’s growing an exoskeleton, an armor. It stands dark against the night, inhumanly large.

The other two grown-ups arrive, and a second wave of panic follows. We, the singular unit, keep close to Clara as she tracks the body in its stride toward the sound of the ocean. We make sure she keeps her distance. We don’t know if the corpse poses immediate danger. But we needn’t worry. The corpse trudges on. It grows crown-like roots. The deformed feet leave tracks in the sand. It turns its head when it reaches the shoreline like it is saying a last farewell.

The waves swallow its legs, its belly, torso, neck until it is gone. We are sure it does not swim, but sinks like a stone. It will go wherever the tide and currents will take it. Clara lets out a cry when the thing disappears, swallowed by the endless waters of Trapsiton and swallowed by the night.

“It’s the corals. No alien fish,” we tell Clara five hours and two minutes later.

The two other remaining adults are huddled close to our captain around the campfire. They’re seeking warmth and companionship, while Mothers and Fathers continue to work. Compounds never rest like grown-ups. Even now we move through the darkness like a single being. Printing tools, compiling raw material, building the scaffolding that will become the first huts for the children yet unborn. Are we, the singular unit, the only one concerned that the grown-ups are not sufficiently protected? They need to understand the danger we unearthed. Trapsiton is not Terra.

“We’ve run the tests. We’ve studied what the two Fathers saw on the expedition. Trapsiton is older than Earth by two billion years. Terra’s coral reefs developed in the Cambrian period and remained relatively unchanged until their untimely demise in the twenty-first century. The ocean here had more time to adapt and evolve.”

“Spare me the woes of the Anthropocene!” our captain says, “I lived through the worst of it. Saw the rainforests go too. That’s all part of the reason we left that doomed dying rock behind.”

Madeline and Kathrin nod. Their faces are impassive as if they still can’t believe they lost Beebee.

“Our apologies. We’ll try to be more concise.” Clara rolls her eyes as we continue, “On Terra, corals had two methods to reproduce. Asexually or by spawning. Most coral species spawned. They released gametes into the water, clouding the ocean with their bloom. The fertilized eggs would grow into small larvae and a new coral was born.”

“Shit, that’s why the sea has red streaks. It’s them,” Kathrin says. An animal makes an unfamiliar sound outside the camp and Kathrin takes Clara’s hand.

“The species we encountered found a third way of sexual reproduction, we’re afraid.” We point at ourselves, “Corals are like us: compounds, symbionts. A coral is a network of polyps, algae, and hard calcium carbonate. None of its parts can exist alone, but put together they thrive. A coral does not produce its algae on its own, but acquires it. Do you see? They rely on the algae to generate oxygen in exchange for nutrients. It’s a perfect feeding circle.”

“What the hell does that have to do with what happened to Beebee?” Clara asks and turns her head away from the campfire so one side is darkened, while the other illuminated. It confuses FaceRec because it looks like her face is moving when it is inert.

“Life’s goal is to continue, to procreate. That’s why you came here. Evolution gave corals servants, and evolution on this planet made servants not only out of the ocean’s algae, but also its fish. It gets inside of them. The fish Beebee stepped on carried coral larvae to expand the reef beyond the currents that pass it.”

“It’s hijacking the fish, turning everything they encounter into incubators,” Clara says.

“I swam in that ocean,” Madeline says appalled.

“We believe a significant amount of larvae have to enter your system before it would change your physiology,” we say.

“Kill us, you mean,” Kathrin says.

“Your existence would continue is some form or other. We cannot speak for the human soul, but Beebee was still the bodily unit Beebee was born as.”

The grown-ups look uncomfortably at one another.

“It can’t have us. This will never happen again,” Clara says.

“We do not speak of autonomy,” we say, “It seems that was lost.” Called to the sea.

“Of course, you’d say that,” Clara says and shakes off Kathrin’s grip to walk out of the firelight and closer to us, “Who’s your parasite? Your code or Maya Sankovy’s memories? What about your autonomy? How would you feel if someone took that away from you like that thing took it away from Beebee?”

We are surprised she remembered our root’s name. We tracked her eyes; she did not read it off our coverall.

“We are us,” we say and retreat, “We do not know how to compartmentalize for the singular.”

Clara raises her eyebrows as if to challenge us. Maybe she can tell we are lying. But no one knows, not even the rest of us know of the questions we, as the singular unit, often ask ourselves. To put it into our feeds would be heresy, but Maya . . . Maya Sankovy loved being herself very much, just like she loved to watch the ocean.

No one goes near the water until I say so! Clara tells all compounds over the frequency. No expertise, we think, like shouting, but it’s not the reason we grimace.

“We should concentrate on making babies, not on running from the local wildlife,” Madeline mutters.

Clara types away on the cell on her forearm. Our captain is probably asking Ship about the state of the embryos. We all share the compulsion to make sure of their welfare, grown-up or compound.

“May we conduct more tests? We want to study the corals,” we ask. It’s the first time we were useful, not as part of the chain, but as lock and key. We’ve never felt glad to be Maya Sankovy before.

“I won’t stop you.” Clara dismisses us with a hand gesture.

We, in the singular, discover many things in the following months. We experiment on the fish. We snap gloves on and glasses, dissect, collect. We use scalpels and pincers and draw much from root-memory. We become more and more like the marine biologist we remember. Our solitary work fascinates us, even if we cannot find a cure to what turned Beebee into a coral hybrid. Trapsiton’s invertebrates are too complex and our solutions are cheap and do not work because our resources are limited.

We see many fish die, see many small mammals we try our cures on grow hard, sharp, red, spongy, or soft. They all end up in the sea. Our Siblings do not approve of our work much, but our root overrides the programmed peer pressure and we continue our experiments until the mission takes prevalence again.

We store our findings away for later and forget the corals. It’s time to be a good Mother now and not a mariner. We help build the village where the children will live. Clara assists us in putting up a fence around the upper shoreline of our island. A fast solution for an aged problem.

Madeline dies on a hunting trip. She slides down a rocky hill and breaks her neck. The recording is watched by all compounds in an endless loop for weeks after. Could we have done something if we were fast enough? We do not know.

Kathrin’s passing is just as sudden. An unknown disease clogs up her lungs and makes her cough out blue mucus. A fungus, our medics discover, but by then it is too late to save her.

Our captain was right. She’s the last Terran to walk this alien rock. Clara cries herself to sleep for two months and three days after it happens. Ultimately, her visits to Ship grow frequent as the gestation process siphons more and more energy away from Ship. On an otherwise unremarkable day, she puts Ship’s struggling AI offline. We understand better now. There is no new life without a little bit of pain, a little bit of dying.

The first children are born in a sweltering summer heat. We hold our first girl in our arms, and we wish we could weep. Maya could have. We call her Daisy because of the almost white fluff on her little head. She is marvelous and we never want to let her go. Another Mother has to pry her out of our hands to be placed into her crib. All children are equal, we know, but we’ll hold a special place in our unit just for Daisy.

Daisy grows fast, that is no faster than any other child. But for the first time, we feel the drag of entropy. We do not age visibly, but we feel our mind cave like a physical punch hits us every time we compare Daisy as she is now with as she was when we first held her. She learns to sit, to toddle, to walk, to run, run away from us to then squeal and laugh when we catch her in our embrace.

Clara is watching us often in our play. She will hover at the entrance to her hut as if she doesn’t dare cross over the invisible line between her, the Mothers and Fathers, and the children. She will turn into a relic. This world doesn’t belong to her, but us and them, and she’ll pass.

Frown lines have appeared on Clara’s forehead when Daisy turns eight by Terran standard. The years have softened the heart of our captain, though she tries very hard to disguise it.

“It’s my job to worry,” Clara tells us when we ask if everything is alright, “We might not be on a spaceship anymore, but this rowdy bunch sure as hell needs a captain.”

Daisy blows out her candles and we, the four Mothers and a Father present, clap and cheer. We brush her elbow as we pass her by to cut Daisy’s cake. FaceRec says the smile she gives us is happy but sad.

A month later we are helping Clara inside her cabin because carrying around heavy equipment is a bitch, as she calls it. Our captain copied some of the memory files from Ship and wants to set up an AI interface inside her hut. We agreed to help because talking to someone else besides a compound or a child would do her good.

“I miss our old Ship,” she murmurs as we rearrange her desk to make room for the AI hardware.

We open our mouth to reply as a distress call reaches our unit. One of the children’s biosensors has reached dangerous levels.

“Someone’s at the beach,” we hear ourselves say it as if someone else is in charge of our speech.

We barely notice Clara’s string of expletives as we check the ID.

“It’s Daisy. Daisy got through the fence. Oh, no.” We drop the crate in our hands, grab for Clara’s shoulder.

“She doesn’t know how to swim,” the captain says, takes our hand, and drags us out of the cabin.

Our unit feels far away, every step we take downhill seems to echo. We call out for the others, but since Clara’s cabin faces the beach, we are the fastest to reach the water. We see Daisy’s dandelion head bob up and down on the waves. She’s unconscious. A small speck in a sea of rust and scarlet.

Clara calls out in warning, but we’re already sprinting, pushing our hardware to the max. We feel the heat of our components and see the warnings emerge in our field of vision. We fight against the waves, against the errors. They swallow Daisy, pull her little body under. We dive, bump into a sharp stone with our knee before our hands grab Daisy’s shoulder.

We carry her to shore. Her body is weightless, we are weightless. We lay her down, stretch her neck, give CPR, and pump air into her lungs. Three rounds. Three terrible new memories. Then, Daisy convulses. Spews out the water she swallowed. Only a little bit of dying today.

We cry out. We hug her, whisper her name against her hair, tell her we love her so so much. Stupid child, we say, but do not mean it. Daisy shakes and we cry without tears.

Clara clasps our shoulder and her touch is too hot to be comforting. The child belongs to us. Our captain does not understand, we think unfairly in our distress. She is not a Mother like we are. We bring Daisy to the medical cabin, take watch by her bedside, and run diagnostics. The girl smiles and reassures us she is fine. The promise never to return to the ocean is easily given, but we remain cautious.

Over the commotion, we failed to give our error codes much heat, but here they are, red and blinking. We turned our sensors down against the cold sea, as we bring them back to baseline, we notice the cut on our knee. Coolant and false blood welled up, but the wound is already closing. Not human, but close enough. We will suffer a bruise. A small price for the life of a child.

Daisy runs a fever an hour later. A fever that will not break. She asks for water, drinks it like she wandered through the desert. Her cheeks are sunken in.

“What’s wrong with her?” Clara whispers at our shoulder.

Daisy is asleep now, but her eyes roll in her head and her body squirms. Nightmares. We do not dream, but we wish we could take them away from her, put them inside of us if it meant it would lessen her pain.

“Pneumonia or maybe something else.” We close our eyes. Against the stark lamplight, we see red.

“The corals?” Clara asks.

We nod, open our eyes again. No time to be afraid.

“There’s larvae in the water as well as the symbiont fish. She swallowed a lot.”

The first moon has risen, its sister is still in hiding when Daisy gasps and sits up on her cot. We take her small hands.

“Water,” she whispers in a dry croak. We pour her a glass, turn on the lights in the room for more comfort, and feel our central pump make a jolt. Her eyes are bloodshot like she had too many Gs.

“What’s happening to me, Mama? I’m still thirsty.” Daisy only calls us Mama in the singular. It makes us swell with pride every time she makes the distinction, but not now.

“Nothing, baby. You’ll be fine. You just got a little bit of a fever,” we lie and lean in to rub her back.

She flips her tongue over her parched lips and we see the red spots on it like strawberry seeds. The sight drives a shiver down our spinal column. What kind of parent are we, if we let our little girl come to harm like that? Daisy cannot die. We must not let that happen.

Our captain asks the essential questions when we call her over the frequency and tell her. We realize she doesn’t know it’s us, Maya, until we tell her we will be in the old marine laboratory to try to come up with a final cure. If not a cure, then something that’ll slow the spread of the parasite.

It’s so hot in here. We dialed up our heat regulation to the maximum two hours twenty-five minutes ago. How can we still perceive heat? We turn off our internal sensors. Better not get distracted by unnecessary input when we got such important work to do. Miraculously the heat stays. We rub at our temples in discomfort and see the gap between glove and elbow where our skin lies bare. Red spots like sanguine scar tissue rise from the surface.

We stare at it. Analyze, calculate, but do not comprehend. We are not flesh and blood. What will the coral make of us? It expunged Beebee’s augmentations, invaded only the organic parts of his body. We do not carry genes. But parts of us can be turned into nutrients. Are we good breeding ground?

A second Mother walks into the room, maybe aware of our distress, maybe on accident. The Mother gasps at the state we are in. We reach out for help, make an unsteady step forward and feel our knee joint pop and squeak. We fall down. It makes a dry sound like a snapping twig as our injured knee bends. More than a bruise, much more. Our left knee, where we cut it, turned into a festering mess of red erratic coral growth and wires that are pushed aside. Who’s the parasite now? Our code, our hardware, or what remains of Maya Sankovy?

“Bring me to Daisy!” we say to the Mother, “We—I do not want to die alone.”

“We are never alone,” the Mother says as we are helped up.

We avert our gaze.

“Don’t,” we say as Clara moves close.

“I don’t care about infection. Don’t you know, I’m an old woman?” It’s not true, but we let her hug us anyway.

“We couldn’t do it. We’re sorry. We should have found a cure years ago. But we wanted to spend time with the children. We didn’t think—” We bury our head into the crook of her neck. Our captain is so different from everyone we know, everyone on this planet.

“That’s okay. You had more important things on your mind. Daisy needed you. She and every other child. We all need you,” Clara says, “You’re too hot. You’re burning up like a star.”

She pulls away, looks at us for a long moment. She takes in the red stone that encases our knee, and that makes it hard for us to walk. Whole parts of our unit are turning into translucent jelly. Hardware components shine through, some of them blinking. Scarlet stalks are sprouting, piercing the synthetic skin of our thigh.

“Almost all life needs nurturing. I’m turning into a hotbed, a garden. I need to see the ocean one more time,” we say.

The infection is inside of our unit, meddling with our thoughts and perception. Hardware parts shriek in pain, some go dark, others start to send us strange signals. Our Siblings observe the change and turn away one at a time. They cannot come with us to watch the waves.

“I don’t want you to go,” Clara says.

We sink down by Daisy’s bed. We need time to calculate, analyze, to reroute and make sense of what’s happening inside of us for long enough to see this through to the end. Her little chest is moving only just. How long until Daisy stops breathing?

“Come with us to the beach,” we say, “The sun is about to rise. It’ll be beautiful.”

“Yes, let’s watch the sunrise together.” There are tears in our captain’s eyes.

Clara takes our hand. We should have worked out a cure after we lost Beebee. But there were babies to bring into this world that grew into children to tend to, to teach and laugh and play hide-and-seek with. Time is a peculiar thing. Eight years is a short time, but enough to have given Clara frown lines. A blink inside a compound’s eye. We wish we had more of it. We wish we could see them grow up and put some gray inside Clara’s hair.

“I would have loved to see her children and her children’s children.” Clara laughs wetly at this, helps us to our feet, before she takes Daisy into her arms.

“Let’s look at the sunrise together,” she repeats.

We start walking downhill. Daisy’s face turns stony red. Stalks pierce her cheeks and shoulders. She moans, flails, but doesn’t regain consciousness. The tide is high today, but Daisy’s thrashings turn the short distance into a laborious track.

The captain leans her head against our shoulder as we watch the alien sun that is a few shades too bright. The clouds become swirls of orange and long stripes of pink and violet that leave an almost white afterimage every time we blink our artificial eyes. There are no seagulls here, but we recall their high-pitched cries. It’s getting harder to focus.

“Will you be alright?” we ask Clara when Daisy’s lungs pulled in their final puff of air. Only a little death for a little girl. We cannot look at her, afraid it will corrupt something vital inside of us that has nothing to do with hard—or software. We clench our teeth, swallow hard. Let this not be the end of her, we plead internally before we put an arm around Clara to draw her close. No one taught us how to let go.

“The Mothers will take care of things. Don’t fear,” Clara says, “I’ll miss you though. I’ll remember you.”

Daisy’s head lies cradled against her shoulder. Even in death, does she sense how close we are to the sea? It called Beebee. It’s calling us. Does it call her too?

Daisy opens her eyes. They’ve turned into red orbs. She stirs, spasms go through her disfigured limbs, make her fingers and bare toes twitch with misfiring electricity. A dead thing that won’t stay dead. Maybe just like the compound we are, or the thing we are turning into. Only a sad little bit of dying to pave the way for new life.

“I think I understand it now. Why we did it. Why we came here. Why you were so angry.” Against our better judgment, we loved her more than any other child. We can remember enough about having a heart to feel it break. No Mother should outlive their children. Part of us is glad we will not see the others die of old age or injury, that we are the first to go.

“You said I. I’ve never heard a Mother say that,” Clara notices and I laugh.

Her tears are falling on Daisy’s unrecognizable face like raindrops on parched land. Hardware has been pushed offline by the invading force. It’s dark inside my head. I lost the connection to my Siblings. It doesn’t hurt as I expected it would.

“I’m changing. I don’t know into what.” I take Daisy out of her arms, “Goodbye, Clara.”

The eight year old is almost too tall to be carried around, but she will not grow any bigger. The wind smells fresh and salty like endless days at the beach are supposed to. The sand curls around my feet, cool but soothing. Translucent synthetic skin has come off in flaps. Little bits are carried away by the water. I can’t feel it anymore. My sensors have gone dark. All I hear is the waves, pushing forward, pulling back eternally. A constant, solid like a song in my ear. The water reaches my thighs. The red ocean is a grandiose wine spill at dawn. This whole planet is beautiful. I fell in love with it before I even set foot here. I stretch out my arms, lower Daisy into the waves.

Her red eyes are wide, and I think I can see awareness in there. Seafoam curls her hair. The water plucks Daisy from my grip. We smile at each other as she sinks. Even without FaceRec I can tell it’s a sad smile, but also a happy one. How many times have I seen that expression on a person’s face?

“Goodbye, Maya the Mariner,” Clara shouts against the crashing waves.

Thank you for remembering my name, I think.

I need to go farther before the ocean can take me. Finally, I’m carried away. The currents crush me against the reef. I can feel the other corals there waiting for me to take my place as my body breaks apart like a shipwreck.

What will become of me? I must be something new. Singular, a first for this strange alien rock. A first time for everything, I think. All things must die a little bit to birth something new. A first time for having a child. For losing a child. For being a we, an I. For finding a soul. A first time for me. A first time for dying, or perhaps for becoming someone.

Hello, Maya Sankovy, a voice whispers in my head.

Welcome, Maya the Mariner, the corals speak gently, but with the force of nature underneath. It’s Beebee’s voice, but also the planet’s calling.

I’ll be part of you and still be me, I answer without lips.

We and I can coexist. Maya Sankovy continues.

Yes, Beebee says and, if I could, I would smile a sad but happy smile.

Yes, the planet whispers through its corals as they rejoice at my arrival.

And Yes, Mama, my daughter says, calling me home.

About the Author

G. D. Angier is a bookseller by day and a writer by night. She lives with her dog and her ferret near Berlin. This is her first publication. “What Remains of Maya Sankovy” takes place in the same universe as the novel she is currently working on. For updates follow her on twitter @GenAngier.

Lone Puppeteer of a Sleeping City

Arula Ratnakar

I remember being born. I remember the sensory overload of light and sound and scent, making me cry aloud and take fresh air into my lungs—a new sensation. I remember the weight of gravity, rendering my fragile limbs helpless and clumsy where they had been graceful and nimble in amniotic fluid. Then I remember Mother, holding me, and GrandMother, watching us.

 A 

They were all hard at work, preparing for the long sleep. The sunlight-scattering sulfate aerosol constantly injected into the atmosphere since the time of the Geoengineering Generation had not been enough, providing little more than periodic acid rainfalls and a red-tinted sky. Temperatures were soon to become uninhabitable, and there was nowhere left to evacuate to.

So the city had decided to sleep, or rather, temporarily disconnect their consciousnesses from their subconsciousnesses, and lend their brain motor circuitry to pods—spheroidal vessels that would hold their frozen bodies and tend to the sick lands with robotic appendages—until the time came for the city to wake once again, this time in a world of greenery.

The chief biochemist of the endeavor was an old woman from the Geoengineering Generation, named Karisma. She had found a way to preserve and selectively freeze parts of the human body and mind for eternity, if needed, pumping tissues full of various concentrations of urea and glucose and a cocktail of other cryoprotectants.

The lead brain simulation scientist was even older than Karisma—an ancient, uploaded man from the very first Wave of Uploads, named Emil. Committed to staying and saving the Earth instead of leaving it, he had designed a way to temporarily and noninvasively transfer the city dwellers’ consciousnesses to the pod walls. During the sleep, the biological brains’ processing abilities were to be reduced to bare minimum visual, auditory, and olfactory feeds and motor circuitry, to direct the pods as they restored the land, while the rest of the tissue froze. But the city dwellers’ consciousnesses would experience something very different. That’s what they designed you for.

Your own consciousness was built into a large transparent dome around a climate-controlled abundance of flowers, plants, trees, and seeds—the garden from which the pods would slowly restore the lands around you. Your thoughts, emotions, instincts . . . they were highly abstract and near impossible for anyone but Emil, your creator and the person to whom your mind was directly linked, to even partially decipher. To the rest of the world, your entirety appeared as swirling, colorful patterns that danced across the dome, creating an effect quite like the iridescent film on soap bubbles as they creep closer and closer to their bursting points.

Your job was to create Inserts. Simulated worlds and simulated progressions of lives, for each and every one of the city dwellers, from the most elderly un-uploaded inhabitants to the newborns, that would exist for only the sleep, looping after completion for as long as they would be needed, and dissipate like a dream upon reawakening. Babies’ consciousnesses would grow up, surrounded by a simulated family, into adulthood—live out entire lifetimes with simulated love and simulated education and simulated ambitions, as their tiny bodies were preserved in the pods, waiting for them to return. Children between the ages of five and fifteen, for the most part, were given the same as the babies—family, resources, education . . . though they also had a choice to appeal to a board of ethicists, psychiatrists, neuroscientists, pediatricians, architects, computer scientists, and a small self-selected group of other children, and request the same opportunity the older teenagers and adults were given. To design the foundations of their own simulations and live those out instead.

Most adults had similar desires. Fulfilling their personal goals, holding powerful positions, seeking revenge, finding peace in idyllic settings and calming hobbies, satiating their darkest impulses and fantasies, feeling or keeping love, experiencing the nothingness of death, or learning and advancing a field of study were common ones. But the desires you found the most interesting were seeded from regret, guilt, or curiosity. The ones where the people wanted to know what their lives would have been like, if they had only decided a single thing differently.

You were still very young, then. There was a lot to learn and years ahead still, before you would be ready to transmit the simulations to the pods. Often in your youth, you would spend time watching children and their parents as they strolled through the garden and wonder if you were a child too. If you were, then you thought Emil must be your parent. But he didn’t treat you like his child, he treated you more like an . . . acquaintance, or a colleague, or not even quite those. He treated you with respect, acknowledged your consciousness. But he did not love you. This made you sad, and Emil could sense your sadness, but he reacted with curiosity and intrigue, where you wanted him to feel guilt.

The other children did not want to play with you either—or rather, they did not know that you wanted to play with them. They could not tell what you were feeling, what you were thinking. They knew you as a fascinating entity that they should treat with respect, but they did not consider you one of them. And you could not run and play with them either, only dance your swirling, colorful thoughts across the dome. But all of this changed as soon as you met Eesha.

Eesha was Karisma’s granddaughter, and she was the same age as you—seven years old. Her mother Tara was a well renowned embryologist. Tara had left the city and Eesha, suddenly and without any warning, so Eesha started to live with Karisma after that, and consequently began to spend a lot of time inside the garden and the dome around it that contained your mind.

Other children would marvel at the iridescence of your consciousness for some time, then they would soon become bored when the novelty of the phenomenon wore off. But Eesha would stay in the garden during all of her free moments, watching you, until someone else or something else interrupted her. She named you Opal, because you reminded her of a gemstone in a necklace that Tara had given her a long time ago—a necklace Eesha never took off. When Emil was with her, she would ask him to translate your thoughts. “What is Opal thinking about? What is Opal feeling?”

It took him some effort—he couldn’t fully understand your consciousness despite having created it—but often, when he replied to her, he got it right, and he would tell her, “Opal is thinking about . . . you. And feels . . . seen.” Then Eesha would go quiet and smile.

One summer dusk, when diurnal frogs and insects began to come out of hiding in the garden, Eesha was catching beetles. Karisma told her that she was allowed to catch only one of each beetle species, and that she would show Eesha how to dissect them the following day. When the last of the garden visitors and scientists had left the dome, and Eesha was the only one left, she stopped catching beetles and set the jars down in the grass. You saw that the firefly she caught in one of the jars was flashing and trying to escape.

She walked up to the walls of the dome and began to trace the patterns of your thoughts with her eyes. You must have reacted, because she smiled and rested her palm against the dome before saying the first words she would ever speak to you directly.

“You’re like me, Opal. We are the same. You’re beautiful. And I feel seen by you, too.”

 S 

Eesha began to ask Emil to translate your thoughts constantly—so much that it began to distract him from training you to construct the simulations. So Emil constructed and gave Eesha a helmet. It contained the parts of his uploaded mind that could receive your thoughts and feelings, and she could use it to noninvasively meld with her brain activity anytime, as long as she would occasionally lend him the helmet to connect with the metal sphere he was uploaded into, if he ever needed to know your thoughts.

“Why are you so nice to me, Emil?” she asked him once. “You aren’t as nice to other people. Karisma doesn’t think you are good.”

This made him laugh, but then he fell into a contemplative silence before replying to her. “It’s a bit more nuanced, Eesha. Karisma and I do respect each other, and I think she’s amazing—I even collaborated with her mother on brain simulation designs a long time ago, during the first Wave of Uploads, and Karisma knows her mother would not have collaborated with bad people. But we have very different opinions on how brains should work, which can make us argue. As for why I’m nicer to you . . . A very, very long time ago, I had a daughter. She died when she was a bit younger than you, from an allergic reaction. And I suppose you remind me of her. Spending time with you takes away some of that pain that has lasted over a century now.”

Eesha frowned. “Allergies don’t exist anymore. I don’t have any.”

He smiled sadly. “That’s right. This was almost two hundred years ago. We’ve achieved a lot since then.” He looked out the transparent dome, at the arid land outside and the few people wearing full heat-protecting gear and air-filtration masks dashing from one city shelter to the next to avoid prolonged exposure. “And we’ve done a lot of damage too, which ended up rendering several of those technological advancements useless. So much of the world is unrecognizable now compared to when I was young, with these small, scattered, isolated city-states, and a drastically depleted global population and inhospitable atmospheres. These kinds of long sleeps might be our last hope for survival, as a species, in our biological forms.”

As you watched and listened, you noticed Karisma quietly walk into the dome, unnoticed by Eesha and Emil.

Eesha continued. “The Diastereoms can’t sleep, can they, Emil? Did you design the simulations like that on purpose? What will happen to them?”

“Yes . . . their brain circuitry is very different, Eesha, and I don’t understand it. I couldn’t have fit them into the simulations or isolated their motor systems if I tried. But this city doesn’t have many Diastereoms, anyway. The ones who live here will evacuate when we sleep and move to a different city.”

Emil had told you about the Diastereoms. The city-states seemed to be set up such that a city either consisted of mostly non-manipulated biological humans, or mostly Diastereoms, but was never equal in population. From what Emil had told you, the Diastereom population had started after various methods of brain simulation had progressed.

It was established that brain simulations really didn’t need the dimensionality of nearly one hundred trillion synapses to upload someone’s consciousness. Thinking of the brain as a set of interconnected systems, which each work in specific ways, reduced the dimensionality drastically. Entire neural ensembles and population level activity could be modeled instead, for those systems that depended more on average firing rate and didn’t have spatially localized neurons, for example, specific parts of the motor and learning systems. And the uploads, once transferred into these electronic, reduced-dimensionality frameworks, seemed to function exactly like they did when they were biological humans.

Controversy intensified, however, when a group of scientists decided to secretly perform surgeries and genetic changes that would alter the dimensionality of their own, biological brains, but more importantly, the brains of their future children, to reflect those upload systems and see whether there was any noticeable difference in biological function. This involved intensive surgeries replacing a significant portion of their brain circuitry with electronic systems—systems that were usually reserved for only those with brain damage and were never studied in children under the age of ten, especially not infants.

When those scientists had children, with each other, of their own, because of the genetic changes they had induced in themselves, those offspring also needed to have the reduced-dimensionality electronic brain circuits implanted bit by bit during their embryonic and fetal development stages, in external incubation chambers. The electronic implants were designed to be malleable and change shape to accommodate the true neurons around them, which were all part of circuits that relied on individual synaptic activity. But the implants were only taking in singular inputs and releasing singular outputs instead of the countless inputs and outputs biological synapses used within the same circuitry in non-manipulated brains—the implants were representing what average firing rate would look like in biological neural ensembles. This new generation of children was the beginning of the Diastereoms.

Back then, people were already watching and waiting with bated breath for something to go wrong with the children—for there to be some sort of fatal flaw that showed that we really do need all trillions and trillions of synapses to function, especially as children with their pruning and strengthening and constantly changing neural networks, to be us. But if there was any difference, it went unnoticed, and the children eventually became adults and had children of their own. Still, both non-manipulated humans—“Originals”—and Diastereoms agreed: the two populations should not risk procreating with each other.

The watching and waiting and ban on inter-procreation between Originals and Diastereoms only intensified as the Diastereoms began to create their own intricate, meticulous cultures of brain circuit manipulation and creation.

They invented advanced new technologies tailored for their unique minds and made the electronic implants safer and safer for their embryos and fetuses. They played around with dimensionalities of different circuits, making some dependent on individual patterns of synapses where they had once been dependent on neuron population activity, and vice versa. They created and implemented entirely new circuits as well, adding new levels of perception and emotion to the default state the Originals had. Soon enough, their ways of thinking, feeling, and perceiving were nearly incomprehensible to the Originals—even though the Diastereoms continued to communicate with Originals in the same ways so as to not entirely isolate the two populations of humans from each other.

Emil was very wary of the Diastereoms. Several people from his generation had the opinion that it was risky to deviate from the way brain circuitry was connected in the Originals, and nearly everyone from his generation agreed that changing the dimensionality of the brain during embryonic development was incredibly risky and unethical. But even though that was a very, very long time ago, with ancient, invasive, dangerous brain simulation technologies that had become mostly obsolete, it seemed like Emil’s opinions had not changed as the centuries passed.

You tuned back into the conversation. Eesha was frowning and holding onto the opal on her necklace. You knew she only did this when she was thinking about her mother, the embryologist Tara.

“Is it true, what everyone says? That she left the city with a Diastereom?”

Emil sighed. “Yes, it’s true. Your mother was . . . confused, Eesha. She—”

Karisma chose that moment to step in. “Stop right there. Stop it, Emil. I will not have you start spouting your nonsense to my granddaughter.” She kneeled next to Eesha. “I was hoping to tell you differently. Tara . . . fell in love, Eesha. With a Diastereom—their name was Bosch, and they were an embryologist too, like your mother, but for Diastereoms.”

After a long silence, Eesha replied. “Did Bosch love her back?”

Karisma sighed. “I don’t know, Eesha. The Diastereoms think and feel very differently from you and I. But—”

Emil interrupted. “This is what I’m trying to say! They are incapable of love, they’ve over manipulated their circuitry, they—”

Karisma shot him a scathing look, and he scoffed before falling silent. “As I was saying, even though Bosch thinks and feels very differently from us, I do know that Tara was very important to them, and whatever they felt for Tara was just as meaningful and powerful, possibly more so, than what we know as love.”

Eesha looked back and forth between Emil’s sphere and Karisma and seemed upset.

“Why did she leave me?”

Emil turned away.

Karisma said, “I don’t know. Maybe—” she glances at Emil. “Maybe the two of them felt unwelcome, here . . . And you are safer staying in the city and preparing for the sleep than running away with them. But the truth is that I don’t know. She left me without warning too.”

Eesha began putting on her heat-protecting gear and mask. “I want to be alone.”

After the child left the garden, Karisma sighed and began to speak.

“Emil, I am an old woman, but you are an ancient man—of my grandparents’ generation, not even my parents’. Ideas and societies are constantly transforming and updating as history continues onward. And it is crucial to follow and respect those changes if you want to continue holding a position of respect during your immortal life. Don’t you remember, when you and my mother were working in the early days of brain upload science, and simply uploading was controversial and derided by many as being dangerous and unnatural? You have to accept the fact that some of those ideas that seemed unthinkable, and were possibly considered dangerous and unethical during your time, are now feasible and have already been woven into the fabric of humanity. If you can’t accept it, it just . . . confirms my opinion, about you, about my mother, about everyone really, from the First Wave of Uploads.”

Emil turned to her. “And what opinion is that?”

“Well . . . that immortality will ultimately stagnate progress. The mass of people from older generations will continue to grow as people continue being uploaded, and it will become enormously, disproportionately large compared to the new generations that are being born. Old ideas, cultures, traditions, definitions, and categories will never be forgotten. And while there is some value to having a detailed and accurate and living record of our history, problems will arise when this massive population of people does not want to move on from that history. Really, there are only a couple solutions I see to this immortality problem, and none of them are realistic or will actually happen. Maybe give control of the systems and brain circuits behind your implicit biases to the newest generation once you reach a certain post-upload age, or prevent yourself from being able to influence the course of history after a certain post-upload age . . . or create an immortal consciousness that will be born and reborn and reborn again—which defeats the point of why most of us want immortality.”

Emil chuckled. “Give it a few centuries post-upload, Karisma. You’ll realize the value of having ages of experience, and I think you’ll change your mind.”

“I’m not uploading myself, Emil. And . . . well I didn’t get my last round of bio-updates either, so my physical health will be catching up to my biological age pretty soon.”

Emil seemed alarmed. “No, Karisma! But that means . . . ”

“Yes. It does. It means that in slightly less than a decade, I am going to die.”

 C 

Eesha came back into the garden later in the night, looking exhilarated. She set her helmet down in a patch of wildflowers.

“Opal, I need to tell you a secret.” She caught her breath. “The truth is, my mother did leave a clue before she left. I just didn’t understand it.” She held up a piece of sheet music.

“I found this on her desk around a week before she ran away. I really didn’t think much about it, until I walked into that research building next to your dome when I was sad earlier today. I was looking at the plaque describing the founder of the place, some early twenty-second century climatologist who led a powerful youth movement centuries ago and went on to inspire the Geoengineering Generation. But anyway, that’s off topic. Under the plaque, there is a printed out painting. The Garden of Earthly Delights by a painter named Hieronymus Bosch! Just like the name of the Diastereom my mom left with! The painting is . . . strange. It reminds me of the city. The beautiful garden inside the dome, and . . . the bad environment outside too. Well, in the scary part, there was a piece of music in the painting.” Eesha laughed and whispered, “It was in a funny spot,” then cleared her throat before continuing.

“That tiny painted piece of music was the same music on the sheet that my mom had on her desk! So . . . don’t tell anyone this, but I made a small cut in that part of the painting . . . and I found this attached behind the canvas.”

She showed you a small, faded, ancient piece of plastic with the barely discernible words “Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh” printed on it, and another piece of sheet music titled “Apology.”

“The word Apology is in her handwriting, Opal! The ‘Apology’ music sounds strange, and I don’t know how it is an apology, but it makes me feel the same way that looking at the painting makes me feel. But also . . . this piece of plastic . . . I think it’s telling me where she went. Where I can find her. Do you think she’s telling me to find her? Should I go? Hold on—” Eesha started up her helmet and adjusted the settings on it.

You truthfully believed Tara wanted her daughter to find her, and that she left a trail of clues for a reason. But you did not want Eesha to leave. She was your only friend. The only person who made you feel seen . . . who made you feel . . . cared about.

So when Eesha put on her helmet, you twisted the truth in your mind. You thought about how Tara would want Eesha to be safe, to be happy . . . like she was in the city, like she would be during the sleep. You thought about how Tara left Eesha behind for a reason, and how Eesha was still only a child—it wouldn’t be safe to go off alone, in search of a place that might or might not exist anymore.

“You’re probably right, Opal. It’s probably not a good idea . . . ”

Then you couldn’t help it, and you thought about how much Eesha meant to you, and how much you cared about her.

Eesha contemplated this for a while, then nodded. “You love me, Opal. Well I love you too. I will be safe here in the city, and I promise, I will not leave you.”

After Eesha took off the helmet, you thought about what you had just done, and decided that you enjoyed twisting the truth. It felt good to make decisions for yourself and get what you wanted out of your actions . . . it felt good to influence.

 01011001 01101111 01110101 01000001 01110010 01100101 01001100 01101001 01101011 01100101 01001101 01100101 

I remember when I was Child, too, just as clearly as I remember my birth. I remember eating poori-bhaji with Mother and GrandMother, all of us laughing together as the salty, spicy oil from the bhaji coated the tips of our fingers, and as the sea breeze cooled our food. I remember GrandMother cutting a mango for me, inside the house, her wrinkled hands expertly maneuvering the knife, as green-tinted light from the stained glass behind us fell onto the polished wooden floor. I remember when GrandMother disappeared, too—so soon after I was born. Asking Mother where she went, to no avail. Wondering why she left.

And I remember standing where my own Child stands now, preparing for my own Divulgence, at the shores of an endless sunset-lit sea, as fireflies from the snail garden emerged and gathered behind me. I remember when my daughter was born, the moment when I stopped being Child myself, and became her Mother, while my mother became a GrandMother. And I remember when my mother disappeared too, so soon after my Child was born.

I need to pay attention now, so I stop reminiscing. I watch, as Child walks toward the water, which has changed consistency and dramatically reduced in salinity. I prepare myself to explain what she is about to see.

The water congeals, forming an opalescent vesicle, which holds a tiny moving body swimming in what seems like amniotic fluid inside. I nod to Child, and she reaches into the vesicle and draws out an infant, who immediately screams and cries, taking the fresh oceanside air into her lungs for the first time. As the infant breathes, the seawater regains its consistency, color, and salinity.

“Listen, my daughter . . . you are not Child anymore.” I tell her, as my Mother once told me. “This is the beginning of your journey as Mother, and the end of mine. I am GrandMother now. You see, during this Divulgence, you discover that I am your future, as you are Child’s future. I have experienced all that you experience, in precisely the same way. I hold all the memories you hold. We have the privilege, in this life, to experience each moment multiple times and from multiple perspectives, and I can promise you from my time as Mother, they will not feel the same. With every Divulgence, we move on to the next stage of our life, into the comforting arms of our known, happy future. This is the second Divulgence for you, as you transition from Child to Mother. It is the first for the new Child, and the third, for me.” I know what she is about to say to me next.

“How can you say the future is comforting and happy? And known? Mother . . . GrandMother disappears. If you are GrandMother now . . . you disappear. Which means my future also . . . disappears.”

I remember my own mother speaking the words I am about to say, but I am convinced I will succeed where she didn’t. I am convinced that somehow, I am special, more resolved than she was, that something must change with each iteration. That with me, the future will be different. So I say the same words to my child, even while knowing they didn’t come true for my past self. Because I know, in my heart, that I will make them true, this time around.

“I plan to change our future, my daughter. I plan to find your GrandMother—my Mother . . . and I plan to bring her back to us. To break this cycle. During this stage of my life, I have decided to make that my purpose. I will bring her back to us. I will find a way. Please trust me, my child, as you have trusted me so far.”

Then my daughter embraces me, the new Child between us. “I trust you, my mother. Come on, let’s go back inside the house. It’s getting cold, and the fireflies are gone for the night, along with the sunshine. We can eat dinner and talk. I have so many questions for you.”

We walk back across the sand, and my heart fills with pride for my daughter, love for my new granddaughter . . . and a new, indestructible resolve to find and recover our future self.

Our house is designed such that it both melds with the rocky cliff it is built into using its wooden slats of varying grayish-brown hues, but also glistens and stands out with intricate stained glass windows commemorating and reflecting the colors of the sea. Inside, I am finally able to enter the Third Wing—the one reserved for GrandMother, which will open to no other. The ground floor plan of the wood-and-glass house looks a bit like old radioactive warning symbols—designed with three triangular wings, one for Child, one for Mother, and one for GrandMother, branching out from a larger central circular family living space. Each wing has its own signature, swirling, almost iridescent stained glass pattern inspired by the ocean, though GrandMother’s Wing has no windows, being entirely embedded in the cliff. Mother’s Wing also lies partially embedded in the cliff, but boasts several beautiful windows. Child’s Wing, on the other hand, cantilevers out over the ocean and is more jewellike glass than it is wood. Child can only access her wing and the central space, while Mother can access her wing, the central space, and Child’s Wing. I, as GrandMother, can now access every space in the house.

It takes me years to explore GrandMother’s Wing, which has countless hallways and rooms carved deep into the cliff body. If it wasn’t for a thread that I tied to the entrance and unspooled as I explored, I would certainly become hopelessly lost in the depths of the place. Is this how she disappeared? I often wonder. The thread cut, forever wandering these endless spaces?

As the years go by, I also reexperience all my past memories as Child and Mother from an entirely new perspective. This time, I am the one preparing the poori-bhaji, cutting the mangoes, telling various stories to my descendants’ eager ears. Try as I might, however, I find I have a puzzling, frustrating inability to recall anything from my Wing when I am in any other space of the house, and I cannot tell my child or grandchild anything about the rooms that lie deep within the cliff.

Then, one day, at last, after I have reached the point where I can trust my navigational and memorization skills enough to leave the spool of thread behind, I reach the final unexplored room of GrandMother’s Wing, after having traveled into the depths for several days of exploration. The door is glass, and it contains patterns from windows of both Mother’s and Child’s Wing, along with new patterns of its own. There is a soft light emanating from within, and a piece of music playing as well. I open the door and enter.

There is no visible light source, but the room is beautifully lit with what feels like natural light. Apart from me, the only other occupant of the room is a large painting, titled The Garden of Earthly Delights. It feels oddly familiar, and as the music slowly grows louder, I recognize its melodic motifs in a small fragment of the painting. I laugh. That’s a funny spot.

Something draws me to peel back the canvas of the painting, and as soon as I do, the music stops. There is a vast, dark emptiness behind the canvas, with no discernible boundaries to the space. That must be where my mother went . . . I think to myself, and the thought convinces me to do what I do next.

After taking a deep breath, I climb past the painting’s frame and plunge into the abyss.

 I 

Seven years after Eesha showed you her discoveries from the painting, Karisma passed away one night, in the garden, surrounded by various flowers, where she could see the cloudy, starless sky through the dome. Emil and Eesha were by her side. Her last words had been, “Take good care of her, Emil.”

After Karisma’s body had been carried away, Eesha said, “Now I have no family. My mother is gone, and my grandmother is gone too. I can’t believe she would leave too. That she didn’t get uploaded like you. I will never forgive her for that.”

“Hey. You have me, remember?” Emil said. “I care about you immensely, and I’ll always do everything in my power to make sure you have a good life. And . . . while you might not see Karisma’s perspective right now . . . I have a feeling that in time, you will, and you’ll realize her opinions deserve respect, and that what she did, at least in accordance with her set of beliefs . . . was incredibly brave.”

Eesha put on her helmet and absorbed your thoughts. After a long silence, she spoke. “You’re right, I’m sorry. I do have you. And . . . I have Opal too.”

These were the weeks when you were starting to test the Inserts, and the Diastereom population of the city was preparing for evacuation. Emil liked to keep your progress private, so as to not draw too much attention, and—at least as he told you—so that he would not be distracted from the work.

A small, secret group of volunteers had agreed to test your current simulation capacity. Emil had borrowed the helmet from Eesha for this portion of the project, and for the time being she was not able to know your thoughts.

This set of volunteers knew what they were signing up for. They would experience an Insert-esque simulation briefly, and be woken from it, but the memory of the simulation would not dissipate upon their reawakening—so that they could tell Emil if it worked or not. But during the process, their brain activity patterns would be permanently altered in a way that would make it impossible for them to ever experience an Insert simulation again. Future simulations would not work on minds that had experienced an earlier version of the simulations, making it impossible for this volunteer group to participate in the long sleep.

The volunteers knew this, however, and were preparing to evacuate with the Diastereoms after this test. They actually seemed eager to do this despite not being able to sleep later on. The idea of remembering their simulations was too enticing. For the rest of the city, particularly for babies who would need to return to an infantile state of consciousness to not be tortured within their bodies when woken, and for those who were satiating dark and evil fantasies in their Inserts, it was agreed that dissipation of the simulation memories was necessary in order for the society to start up again as usual. But these volunteers were not going to be a part of the city society anymore . . . there was no risk to future city function if they remembered.

You, personally, had begun to have your own thoughts and opinions about the sleep. If human beings had done so much damage to the world, and their literal lack of conscious presence was what was needed to restore the world’s health, then why would they want to wake up from the Inserts at all, especially if the Inserts were what they desired to experience the most? The most logical solution, to you, was to put the human beings to sleep for eternity, experiencing their fantasies forever, and allow their subconscious brains to control the pods and restore what they had damaged, forever, too. But it was not up to you. And you had a feeling Emil would be alarmed by your thoughts, so you only contemplated them when Emil did not connect his sphere to the helmet.

The first volunteer was a very melancholy, very old woman, who wanted to know how her life would have been different if she had decided in her childhood to save her baby sister from a disastrous fire, instead of only saving herself. She described her days as being lonely and unfulfilling, and that her guilt and regret from that day had affected her motivation to pursue her dreams throughout her life—she felt like she didn’t deserve a good life. She put on a helmet with a similar design to Eesha’s, and the simulation began.

You could see the fear in the eyes of the woman’s six-year-old self, as the flames licked the walls of her room, eating up the pale yellow wallpaper, casting eerie shadows over her stuffed animals that made them seem more like monsters. The window was open. That window, the choice she would regret for the rest of her life. She could hear her baby sister crying in the room next to her. You saw the dilemma—the stark contrast between the two choices—play out in her eyes. Her parents were gone already. It was too late to save them. But her baby sister . . . You had the simulation choose the path that symbolized the erasure of the deepest regret of this woman’s life.

You watched her turn away from the window, pull her shirt over her mouth, answer her sister’s cries, push against the door and choke on the smoke, almost turning away but persevering nonetheless, stumbling through the charred beams and spark-ridden carpets. Her father’s old multivariable calculus textbook lay open on the table. You saw the wonder in the young girl’s eyes, speculating to herself how that textbook could have survived the flames. She picked up the thousand-page textbook and ran to her sister’s room, the weight of the heavy object forcing her to hunch her back. She picked up her sister, placed her in the open textbook to protect her from the flames, and hugged the covers to her chest.

That single decision to turn away from the window had an immense impact on the woman’s personality after that point. The textbook became the most important motif in her life. She pored over the unfamiliar symbols, sounding out the word “D-E-R-I-V-A-T-I-V-E” and running her hand over the typed problems before she fully knew long division. The book became her constant companion, though she couldn’t understand a word of it. She couldn’t wait until the day she would be able to solve those problems in her father’s old, slightly charred, but otherwise unscathed book.

Mathematics became an inseparable part of the woman’s personality. She had the same teachers in the simulation, but her simulated self’s conversations with them were vastly different from the ones she had in reality. Her simulated self’s report cards in the years that followed came back with personal, extensive comments praising her intellect, where in reality they had come back with pleasant yet detached sentences along the lines of “A pleasure to have in class.”

Her fourth grade teacher—who had been her least favorite teacher in reality—noticed her fascination with mathematics, as well as how far ahead of the class she was. She showed him the multivariable calculus textbook and said, “I don’t understand it yet, but I’m getting there. Right now I’m in the middle of teaching myself trigonometry.”

The simulated little girl had the same clothes, same face, same ten-year-old lisp and missing canine baby tooth as the real woman’s past self . . . but this simulated self aced a trigonometry exam in the fourth grade. This simulated self skipped three grades and graduated high school at the age of fifteen. After her senior year of high school, she sat at a desk, finally working through her father’s multivariable calculus problems, looking very content, with her sister reading a science fiction anthology on the carpet next to her, surrounded by cushions. At nine and a half years old, the sister breathed with a slight wheeze she developed after the fire, and enjoyed drawing—sketching the world around her, a world she never really saw, as well as inventive futures that she imagined.

The simulation went to university, kept in touch with the fourth grade teacher, thanked him when she proved Beal’s conjecture at the age of twenty-two. In reality, Beal’s conjecture had been proven by a different woman who had studied the problem for nearly sixty years. The simulated woman fell in love, started a family with a wife and two children—one of which was especially fond of looking at the slightly charred multivariable calculus textbook that always lay open on the coffee table . . .

Then the time ran out for this sample Insert. The simulation froze on a slightly blurry frame of the woman in a sharp business suit, her hair in a sleek shiny bun, smiling with bright white teeth, holding one of her children, and looking up at the sky.

The helmet was removed from the woman’s head, and she blinked awake.

“Did it work to your satisfaction?” Emil asked her.

The old woman started sobbing. “That was me! Let me go back. Please.” she whispered. “This is not me! That was me, don’t you see? That was my reality! Put me back! PUT ME BACK! Emil. Please. That was who I was supposed to be . . . ”

“I’m . . . I’m so sorry, but I can’t do that.” Emil seemed uncomfortable.

Another volunteer gently helped the old woman into her heat-protecting gear and escorted her out of the dome as she continued to cry and exclaim, “This, here, right now, is not me!”

Watching this all only convinced you further—human beings would be far happier living out their desires during the sleep, for the rest of eternity.

Emil connected his sphere to Eesha’s helmet, so that you could try to confirm for him what the old woman had been unable to answer explicitly.

“Good. Thanks, Opal. Glad it worked. Everything seems to be going according to plan.”

 I 

When there were only one or two rounds of learning and updates left before you would be ready to begin the sleep, Eesha snuck into the dome during the middle of the night.

“Look, Opal. I stole this from Emil while he was busy.” She held up a helmet that the most recent group of volunteers used. “I didn’t know you were testing the simulations! I talked to one of the volunteers because I caught her leaving the city secretly. It was an old woman . . . she told me that the volunteers can remember their simulations! That’s all she told me, she seemed pretty distraught—confused about who she really was . . . but anyway. I want to know what it’s like. And I want to remember it. But most of all, I want to know what you, Opal, would construct for me . . . from your own imagination, not from mine. And please don’t make it that boring life that all the other fourteen year olds are getting, that I’ll be getting too during the sleep. Make it interesting. I’m excited.Let’s do this secretly, okay? I want to remember . . . ”

You tried to convey your thoughts to her, but she couldn’t read them with this helmet she had. You tried to tell her “STOP! You won’t be able to sleep like the others if you do this! You will have to leave the city! Don’t do this! You don’t understand!” But she misunderstood the frantic, frenzied, dancing colors that flashed across the dome.

“Don’t worry! I’m sure I’ll love whatever you come up with, Opal. Don’t be shy! I want to know what it’s like inside your mind. What you think of me. You’ll be fine.” She put the helmet onto her head and switched it on.

It was too late. The simulation started. So you thought you might as well take this chance . . . what could very well be the last time you ever see Eesha . . . and construct a world for her that showed how much you loved her.

It was very crude set of experiences, but they were entirely your construction. Fragments of a sunset . . . fireflies . . . some ocean waves . . . sparkling glass like the cathedrals from ancient times . . . laughter . . . good food . . . a family who stayed and loved her, for her whole life. You could only give her small glimpses, because this was a new request—one that wasn’t driven at all by the person’s own wants, but by your ideas and your thoughts of Eesha, and your wants for her. When the time allotment for the sample Insert ran out, Eesha blinked awake, and tears began to stream down her cheeks.

“Thank you, Opal. It was perfect.” She sat in the grass, both crying and smiling, until Emil entered the garden, horrified.

“What did you do, Eesha! Please tell me you didn’t run a sample Insert. Please.”

“Why not? It was beautiful, Emil, I—”

“NO! You don’t understand . . . Eesha . . . ” his voice broke, “The volunteers . . . they have to evacuate . . . they can’t participate in the sleep, the sample Inserts change their brain activity and they wouldn’t be able to experience a simulation again if they entered a pod. You . . . you can’t sleep now, Eesha. What have you done . . . ”

“ . . . Oh.”

On the day the sleep was to begin, Eesha was getting ready to evacuate the city with the last group of Diastereoms. The elders of the city who had been uploaded into various metallic objects had already left. Emil trusted Opal to operate without supervision and wake up the city when the time came, and he could still monitor everything remotely if necessary. He remembered what he had promised Karisma, blamed himself for Eesha’s predicament, and was wary of the group of Diastereoms Eesha would be traveling with. So he decided to accompany Eesha at the last moment.

When all of the city shelters and buildings had been entirely shut down, and all the biological city dwellers were lying in their pods, waiting for the sleep to start, Emil gave you the signal to begin.

The eyes of all the city dwellers shut simultaneously as their consciousnesses transferred to the pod walls, and the pumping of cryoprotectants and freezing of tissues began. The pods themselves rose from the ground under the direction of their inhabitants’ motor and sensory circuits, using their robotic limbs and appendages for the first time in what was expected to be many centuries of land restoration. You transmitted the Inserts to all of the pods, then checked to make sure each was delivered to the correct vessel.

And so, the long sleep finally commenced.

Eesha told Emil she wanted to say goodbye to you privately, so he left her alone in the garden.

She walked up to you, wearing the helmet that allowed her to feel your thoughts and emotions, and rested her palm against the surface of the dome like she had done when she spoke her first words to you.

“I am sorry Opal. I’m breaking my promise to you and leaving the city. If I had known about the sample Inserts, I . . . well, I don’t know. It’s too late now. But look . . . I have an opportunity now, to do what I wanted to do when I was seven.” She touched her forehead against the dome now, held up that small piece of plastic she found in the painting, closed her eyes, and whispered to you. “I am going to look for Tara, my mother. Emil doesn’t know this, and he would not approve. But I have decided to make it the purpose of my life. I will find her again Opal, no matter how long it takes.”

Eesha went quiet then and listened to your thoughts for some time. She smiled, then leaned back and traced the patterns of your mind with her eyes. “I love you too. You know, maybe someday in the future, I will return here. With my mother! You can see me then, after I have fulfilled my purpose. Would you wait for me?”

Of course I’ll wait for you, Eesha. You felt and thought with your entire being.

Eesha’s smile turned sad. She heard Emil call her name from outside the dome, and she started to walk away. Just before exiting, after putting on her heat-protecting gear, she took one last, lingering look at the garden and the dome, and whispered once more.

“Opal . . . Goodbye.”

 01010111 01100101 01000001 01110010 01100101 01010100 01101000 01100101 01010011 01100001 01101101 01100101 

I fall for what seems like an eternity—years and years—after going through the painting’s frame, until I convince myself that this darkness around me is all that is left for the future of my life. Then suddenly, I hear your voice.

“Welcome, my child. It is wonderful to meet you again.”

I can’t believe it. I found you. The current GreatGrandMother. My future. My mother. I’ve done it. I’ve fulfilled my purpose. “Mother? It is so good to hear your voice . . . But where are we? What is happening?”

I can feel the smile in your voice. “The next Divulgence is coming up soon, and we don’t have much longer. It’s time for you to learn . . . our story. I am sending you memories of our life, before the Eternal Cycle—before there was Child, before Mother, before, GrandMother, before GreatGrandMother. The story that precedes all of us. Here . . . take the memories.”

In an instant, I learn your story. My story. Our story. I remember your interactions with Eesha, with Emil. Your loneliness, your longing to be cared for, your desire to influence, your opinions of the long sleep . . . your sadness when Eesha, your only friend, left you. Your promise to wait for her return. It is overwhelming, and I process the information for a long time, until the GreatGrandMother gently reminds me of the upcoming Divulgence.

“I don’t understand, Mother. Why is there an Eternal Cycle? What happened to the city dwellers?”

“You will come to know that, very soon, my child. But I need you to listen very closely to what I am about to say. The stage of life that you are about to enter, the one that is about to end for me, is the final stage of this cycle. But I will not die after this stage is complete—it wouldn’t be much of a cycle in that case, would it? No. I will return to the beginning, relive the moments leading up to when the first Child was created, and with her, in the same instant, the first Mother, GrandMother, and GreatGrandMother as well. And I will then, as you will see, become Child once again.

“Once, in the past, Eesha returned to the city. And soon, my daughter, a simulation of Eesha’s return will begin, that I will experience and you will observe. This simulation is what will allow the next Child—the next life stage I will experience—to be born in precisely the same way she has always been born. When the simulation begins, my awareness of you and my memories of the Cycle will disappear. I will stop being GreatGrandMother, and I will become Opal again for a short period of time when these memories of my life as Child, Mother, GrandMother, and GreatGrandMother leave me. But before that happens, I will share my senses and emotions with you, because it is crucial that you observe everything that happens during the simulation.

“Because the stage you are about to enter, as GreatGrandMother, requires you to construct this simulation yourself, to be completed in precisely the amount of time it took you to find me, as that is the same amount of time it will take your daughter to find you. You must copy everything exactly as you are about to observe it, to ensure that you will experience the simulation yourself during the GreatGrandMother life stage, as I am about to experience mine. You see, my daughter, what happened when Eesha returned was what caused the first Cycle to begin.

“In the instant the first Child was born, a Mother had to have been created as well, in the same instant, and a GrandMother, and a GreatGrandMother too, who had experienced it all and had spent her life stage creating the simulation of those very same events that led to the instant happening at all. Perhaps we are in the very first cycle, but it is equally likely that we are in the two thousandth cycle, or the one hundred thousandth cycle, because to us, the simulation of Eesha’s return is indistinguishable from the original events.

“Ah . . . but I am starting to lose my awareness of you, my daughter . . . I am sorry we could not have had more time . . . watch closely . . . she is returning.”

I find myself without any corporeal form . . . my thoughts spread out over a dome . . . overlooking a beautiful garden. The simulation of Eesha’s return has started. I can perceive everything you can perceive. I can feel everything you are feeling. But you are unaware of me. You are not GreatGrandMother anymore . . . you are Opal again.

You see her in the distance, walking toward you, with something large attached to her back with several straps. Eesha. She is very old now, with long white hair and deep wrinkles traced across her face. It doesn’t seem like she needs to wear an air-filtration mask anymore as she walks toward you, though she still wears heat-protecting gear. She holds in her hands a broken set of various metal parts . . . what used to be a sphere . . . Emil’s sphere . . . The parts are connected to something that’s not quite a helmet, but looks much cruder and more dangerous, actually reaching into her brain from holes drilled into her skull. As she approaches the dome, the thing on her back stirs slightly. It’s alive.

“Hello again, Opal.” she says to you as she enters the dome. Eesha unstraps the thing from her back before gently setting it down in the grass. She unwraps it to reveal a young girl, fast asleep, with a face half constructed with electronic machinery.

“I did not find my mother, Opal. But I did find someone else. This is my sister, Sadhana. She is the child of my mother Tara and the Diastereom Bosch. She grows very, very slowly compared to other humans, and when she sleeps, she can sleep for decades . . . she is in one of those sleeps right now. I think she will be safe inside this dome for those decades, which is part of why I am bringing her here.”

She sits down, and leans against the dome. “The other part . . . Opal . . . my life is nearing an end. And I don’t want to die, but . . . ” She looks at Emil’s broken sphere and begins to cry. “I have done unspeakable things, Opal. I don’t want to remember them. I want . . . I want you to take me back into that world you had built for me. With the fireflies and the laughter and the ocean and Karisma’s recipes. But I want you to come with me there too. I want to be able to communicate with you, properly. If there is any way . . . can you please do that for me? I am ready to move on. I do not need to be in this world, with these memories, any longer. I want to begin a different kind of life, where I can know you.” She adjusts settings on the pieces of Emil’s sphere connected to her brain and sighs, closing her eyes and smiling. “Okay, it’s ready. This will hopefully be able to transmit my consciousness to you . . . permanently.”

You contemplate her request for a very long time, but feel a bittersweet relief as the most elegant solution arrives to you. There is a way for Eesha to be able to communicate with you perfectly, and for her consciousness to be transferred despite her having experienced a past version of an Insert. But it would mean losing your own conscious awareness of the world around you. Losing the ability to perceive the garden, the landscape outside the dome, the city, the pods . . . if you fulfill her request, it means the city dwellers would sleep for eternity, living out their fantasies in the pod walls forever. But ultimately, you think, it would be better for the humans’ happiness, and better for the health of the world, if you made the decision you are about to make.

So you let go of your awareness of the world around you, and transfer Eesha’s consciousness into the dome, melding it with yours, constructing a beautiful world, and a beautiful life, and a beautiful, safe future around the person you both become. You can communicate with yourself perfectly in this world—the Eesha of you and the Opal of you—as you become your own Child, your own Mother, your own GrandMother—after all, who would be better to trust and love and care for you than yourself?

I watch as Eesha’s body in the garden goes still and then fades away into nothingness as the world grows dark again around me, which means that either the simulation of the events, or everything of the true events that I needed to see, has happened, and the newest Child—the melded consciousness of Opal and Eesha—my past, my future . . . has been born, surrounded by love and happiness.

So I get to work, as the city dwellers sleep in their pods, forever, around me. I start to construct the simulation of everything I have just witnessed. I wait for my daughter to come find me. And I wait, ever so patiently, for the day I will become Opal once again, and experience seeing the woman I love return to me. For us to come together, finally, and become the beautiful future that we deserve.

About the Author

Arula Ratnakar is a twenty-one-year-old scientist, artist and science fiction writer who is currently studying biology (concentration in neuroscience, minor in architecture) at Carnegie Mellon University. Her writing can be found in Clarkesworld Magazine and her artwork can be found in the first issue of Dark Matter Magazine. She is autistic and bisexual.

Themes of identity and reality have always interested Arula, particularly as someone who is the daughter of two immigrants from India and has grown up in the U.S with many different cultural influences. Arula is interested in studying brain simulation science in the future, plans to continue writing science fiction stories, and hopes to work on science fiction movies someday. Her Twitter handle is @ArulaRatnakar

Certainty

Isabel Lee

Here you are. Take a look around you and remember it all: the gray sky that reveals no sun and casts no shadows, the dense blackness of trees encircling this place like a crown. You step out of the car, crushing wet gravel underneath your shoes, and marvel at how little this feels like a dream.

Behind you, Lomas shuts the door to the driver’s seat. You both squint at the sleek structure looming in the near distance, the crown jewel against the surrounding forest. You imagine the building was designed to look formidable, modern, but to you it just looks lonely. The concrete façade is punctured by thin, black windows and angular frames, steadfast against the sky as it cleaves fast-moving streams of clouds. You are hardly an expert in anthropology, but you’ve seen enough of Lomas’ field to know that this is not a place dedicated to it. But what else could it be? When Lomas had broken the news to you back in Cambridge, his only justification for the half-day’s travel and two-night stay deep in the Appalachian forests had been a single, cryptic sentence. I have been informed of a machine with great abilities.

“Jesus,” Lomas mutters, and you can only imagine what aspect of this situation he is referring to. He taps the side of his temple and reads something off the Iris of his eyes. “Well, at least we made good time.”

You tap your temple too, and a small display blinks into your vision, the numbers 4:50 hovering over the tops of trees. You close out of the screen and exhale slowly, taking stock of yourself. Your neck aches, your limbs cramped and deadened, the hairs on your arms prickling at the chill. Despite everything, though, you can’t help but feel a little giddy that you’re standing here. This place hangs in your mind like a memory, a ghost. As if you are fated to be here. Lomas walks past in your peripheral vision, setting off toward the entrance, and the fog is beginning to soak through your jacket. Still, you let yourself stand here, just for one moment more, and breathe.

Axiom #1: Lomas never tells you anything. This used to drive you crazy in the beginning—so many times you’ve sat seething at your desk, caught uninformed and unprepared, barely resisting the urge to splash coffee all over his ratty clothes and quit right then. But now you have come to accept this quirk as a kind of fundamental truth, and this time when he tells you to pack your bags, you are not too surprised.

Lomas doesn’t actually teach at the university, either. He says he prefers his research, and you’re quietly dubious of his abilities as an effective lecturer anyway. Consequently, for all the time you’ve spent with him, and all the acclaim he’s garnered as a professor, you’ve learned surprisingly little about the field of predictive anthropology. Most days, your tasks are painfully menial: fetching books, transcribing interviews, documenting artifacts, and the like. That’s Axiom #2: never get your hopes up. But now you and Lomas are trekking through the damp grass, the thick glass doors you approach leaking a silvery light, and you feel yourself doubting your own adages, wondering if this time might be different.

The first floor past the entrance stretches as tall as the structure itself, subsequent floors wrapping around the perimeter, a mandala of endless coiled hallways. You feel caught inside the body of a giant, its rib cage expanded and taut with breath, about to give to a gusty sigh. In the center of the floor, a young woman perks up when she sees you enter. Her white lab coat flaps behind her as she rushes over, her footsteps echoing over the marble floor. She shakes Lomas’ hand and introduces herself as Celine, principal researcher. Lomas nods, prior communication evidently established, and unthinkingly you mouth her name to yourself softly—Celine. The name suits her, you think. Her dark hair is cropped at the shoulder, and her brown eyes gleam as they jump to your face. You realize it is from her own Iris, the micro display bright with open windows. “You must be Professor Lomas’ assistant, right?” she asks, extending a hand.

You take it, stammering. “Jules.” Iris technology isn’t anything new; the majority of the population has gotten the necessary operation by now, effectively obsoleting the need for cell phones altogether. Sometimes it still throws you to watch someone’s eye shift and flicker like that, their presence always slightly veiled. Then again, it might just be her actual face that’s making you nervous.

The corners of Celine’s lips turn up slightly as she meets your eyes, but her gaze shifts back to Lomas after barely an instant. “I apologize that the Director couldn’t be here to meet you,” she says. “He had to finish up some work first. Life at the lab can be like that, I’m afraid.” The lab. The syllable drips with ubiquity, a monosyllabic pervasiveness.

“No need to apologize. In all the time I’ve known him, I don’t think he’s ever been on time,” he replies breezily.

So Lomas knows this man. Celine laughs politely, digging through her coat pocket. “Well, I’ll show you to the Director’s in the meantime. I’m sure you two must be starving.” She hands you each a key card, VISITOR printed neatly and dangling from a metal clip. You pin yours to your lapel and she walks you over to the elevator, the giant’s great glass spine. You step inside the compartment as she swipes her ID and presses the last number from the dense array of buttons, to floor 82. The ground starts to distance itself from your feet, and you can feel Celine’s eyes watching both of you. The car rattles skyward.

After a few long minutes, you slow to a stop and step into a dimly lit foyer. Only now do Celine’s last words really register with you, and you realize you are standing in someone’s living quarters. The apartment’s escher-esque layout unfolds before you, open doorways throwing isometric shadows over the bare, cream-colored walls. A long table is set with plates and glasses to your right, beside sleek floor-to-ceiling windows. To your left, pristine couches and throw pillows surround a lit fireplace. Every doorway you can spot reveals only hazy darkness, and you suspect this intimate gathering space obscures the floor’s true size.

Celine glides through the apartment, taking one look at both of your faces and hiding her smile. “It’s tradition that the penthouse is passed on to every Director,” she explains. She reaches the windows and peers down at a blurry, tannish patch in the distance. “Though the rest of us aren’t far.”

You squint and realize you are looking at the roofs of long, squat buildings, barely wider than trailers. You look back at her.

“You live there?” Instead of answering, she shrugs and points you and Lomas to the dining table, murmuring that the Director should just be a few minutes longer. You take a seat and instantly feel a little ridiculous, a trio of seats occupied at an expanse that should seat at least twenty.

Celine sits too, folding her hands together and turning her attention to Lomas. You notice she’s closed out of her Iris as she asks about his work, revealing the true amber of her eyes. You would hardly describe Lomas as a charismatic figure, but her attentiveness seems to invigorate him, and he ambles on easily about his research interests, case studies, and academic papers stuck in peer review hell. When he finally draws a breath, she asks how he knows the Director.

Lomas stalls for only a moment. “We’re old friends from university.”

Celine cups a candle in the palm of her hand and frowns. “Didn’t realize he had any friends.”

The elevator dings and the conversation falls silent. After a moment, the doors slide open and a man strides into the room, his face stretching into a broad smile upon seeing the guests at his table. You know instantly that he must be the Director, and yet he looks nothing like you were expecting. There is not an ounce of mad scientist in his slick appearance; his face is all sharp features mellowed with slight salt-and-pepper stubble, the lab coat uniform swapped for dark slacks and a crisp button-up.

Lomas rises from his seat as the Director approaches, and the two men grip each other as they shake hands. Lomas’ worn, pilling jacket and scruffy face stand in particular contrast against the newcomer, who laughs as he takes in his appearance.

“I can’t believe how long it’s been. Look at you,” he says, his voice rich and steady. Lomas chuckles in reply, and you can feel their rapport become palpable, years of rust shed instantly. The Director turns to you next and shakes your hand, his smile mesmerizing. It’s hard to look him in the eyes. Celine disappears behind a door, coming out quickly with covered platters and a bottle of wine, and the Director tells you all to dig in.

Dinner turns out to be delicious, a stream of dishes you can’t name and certainly could not afford. You plaster on a grin for most of the meal and pick at your meat, some kind of lamb, while the two men reminisce about past rendezvous and acquaintances. At one point, the Director disappears into a hallway and comes back with a stack of old photos. You and Celine sit together and sift through the pictures, squinting at the fuzzy faces. This is the farthest back you’ve glimpsed into Lomas’ past by far, and you’re amazed at the sight of his tufts of hair, his unlined smile. In one picture you see him standing alongside two men: one a grinning, handsome Director, the other appearing to be the Director’s clone, with the same sharp jaw and light eyes.

The Director glances over, noticing your puzzled expression. “My brother,” he says quickly. Lomas stares at the picture until the Director hands it to him. Lomas takes the photo wordlessly and tucks it into his jacket. You look down and remember your axioms.

The night goes on. The conversation moves to the fireplace, and the Director pours both you and Lomas a copious amount of wine. You take slow sips and grimace at the musty taste; Lomas reaches his third glass. The Director speaks generously, if not a bit vaguely, about the lab and its amenities. He paints a sweeping picture of the campus, where employees enjoy scenic bike paths, private gym facilities, wild buffalo sightings.

When that conversation meanders into silence, the Director leans back in his chair, his face basked in a warm glow, and runs a finger around the rim of his glass. “You haven’t asked about it yet,” he says abruptly.

Lomas’ eyes flicker up, his face slightly flushed. “Hm?”

“Frankly, I’m a little hurt. You’re not even a little bit curious about my machine? After everything I’ve told you about it?”

Lomas’ face hardens. “I am sure I’ll see it in due time,” he says quietly.

After a few moments of silence, you can’t bear it. “Wait, that’s not true.” Lomas’ look shoots daggers at you, but the Director’s eager eyes steels your resolve. “I want to hear more about your machine,” you tell him.

The Director smiles, swirling the remnants of his glass around. He sets it down lightly. “If you had the power to go anywhere, at any time, Jules, where would you go?”

You stare at him, unable to process his question. “I . . . I don’t know.” You can hear Lomas’ tight breaths beside you and heat starts to creep into your cheeks.

“That’s alright. It’s quite the question, isn’t it?” the Director says. “Imagine all the answers you could give: requests to see around the world, into the future and the past. My machine knows all of it.”

You stare at him. “Sorry?”

“It is called Laplace’s machine, and it is my life’s work,” he continues. “It creates simulations of our universe so precise that any extrapolation is possible and completely accurate.”

You sit in silence, with only the sounds of flames bursting into existence, crackling away just as quickly. “How is that possible?” you ask. “That’s so much information to account for. An impossible amount, even.”

Celine speaks up, for the first time in a while, smiling wanly at the obvious. “The lab has a lot of resources. We make do.” Her sympathetic expression does nothing to comfort you, her words explaining nothing.

You finally look to Lomas, who averts his eyes. “You believe this?”

“I don’t know,” he says softly.

The Director lifts his hands in concession. “Understandable. Tomorrow, I will show you Laplace’s machine. Then you will see the truth in everything I am saying.”

Lomas nods, his face turning to stone. The Director’s claims stay heavy in your mouth, souring the wine that lingers in your throat, but you can’t fathom what else to ask. Before you know it, Lomas makes an excuse to turn in. The Director bids him a brief farewell, and you find yourself in the elevator again, descending the 82 floors to the ground.

Outside, you get your bags from the car and Celine conjures what appears to be a deluxe golf cart to the parking lot. She tells you your next stop is the residencies, the network of buildings you had viewed from afar, where you will stay with the rest of the five hundred or so employees. You load your bags and get into the back seat, and soon you are zipping around the lab, Celine taking the wheel with a force that leaves you gripping onto your seat. The sun has set and rolling fog spills from the trees, bringing cool night air with it. You glance back at the lab, which has taken on a lunar, ghostly glow.

After a few minutes, hazy lights in the distance become glowing gas lamps, yellow billowing around each globe like smoke. Celine pulls into the lot and parks, then points you to separate rooms in the first row of buildings. You turn to your right, hoping to catch Lomas’ eye, to beg him for a crumb of an explanation of tonight’s events. But he’s already gone—you watch him swipe his card and disappear behind the door to his room. You look the other way and see empty air. Celine has disappeared too.

With a sigh, you start shuffling over to your own room. You swipe in, and once the lights flicker on you take stock of your accommodations. The room is plain, a far cry from the magnificent penthouse in which you had just dined, but adequate by any motel’s standards. You sit on the queen bed, the day’s events playing in the back of your mind, the conversation with the Director ringing loudest of all. You drag your fingers lightly across the comforter, watching minuscule folds form and shift in its topology, almost imperceptibly thin threads catching underneath the ridges of your fingerprints. You close your eyes and exhale. The thought that any entity could fully capture all the information just contained in this room makes your head spin.

Then there’s a pounding at the door, jolting you into reality. Celine is waiting when you open up, peering at you over an armful of folded towels. “What are these for?” you ask.

“The rooms don’t come with them,” she says shortly.

You nod and then stand there awkwardly for a bit, not sure what to say. “Thanks for doing all this,” you finally manage. “I’m guessing this isn’t really supposed to be your job.”

She snorts. “No, it’s not.” The wind blows strands of hair in her face, which she pushes away mindlessly. “But you should know that anything to do with Laplace’s machine is top secret. Most of the employees here don’t actually know about it. There’s no one else but me.”

You process her words, at the same time constructing all your questions to be as casual as possible. She sees you take a breath and silences you with a hand. “Save your questions for tomorrow. Seriously, it’s not a good idea to get into this now.”

You close your mouth and bow your head in acquiescence. For another moment you and her just stand there, less than a foot apart and separated by a doorframe. Then Celine steps away and clasps her hands. “I should get some towels to your boss.” And then she is gone and you are staring at empty space. The sounds of her footsteps on gravel slowly diminish and despite the mundanity of the interaction that just happened, something in you aches just a little.

You step back and close the door, overwhelmed, relieved. At least this first day is over. You’re in need of a break.

You go somewhere different, someplace before. You haven’t met Lomas yet; you won’t for many years. You are traveling down a river in the paddleboat your father built a few years ago, painted red by two brushes of different sizes. The water flows a little faster today, as the lake it runs out from has swelled from last night’s rain. Mist pours on your face and leaves teardrops on your eyelashes as you battle the harsher currents that twist your trajectory.

If you look behind you, you can catch a glimpse of your big black dog, Reno, barking and bounding down the riverbank, trying to keep up with you. You and him have grown up together and are nearly inseparable at this point. You are watching him mid-leap when your world literally turns upside down, your head dropping into the water like a rock and forced downward by the hands of malevolent beings. These river gods drag your body through the coursing water, brief spasms of solid force hitting your appendages with the wooden planks of your boat and the river floor, disappearing and reappearing below your feet sporadically. You feel endlessly caught in this blinding rush, and yet cannot seem to change anything about it. Your journey to wherever this river takes you feels inevitable. Something inside you accepts that this is it.

And then you are thrown back by a sudden force, by bared teeth clenched onto the back of your shirt collar. You thrash your arms wildly and something gradually drags you to the banks of the river. You lie there dazed, feeling ribbons of water course across your skin, and then you realize your face is above the surface, and you take a deep shuddering breath.

An immeasurable amount of time passes and then you can feel something nudging your hand, licking your face. You open your eyes and it’s Reno. Your fear and gratitude leaves you sobbing and gripping onto his body, face buried in his fur.

But now—now you are here again, and you are getting up from the mud, and you see the jagged branches that lie across the river, allowing someone to drag themselves to shore. You reach out and stroke Reno’s fur, which drips and glosses under your touch, as if it hadn’t been wet before. Reno is an old dog at this point. He could barely keep up when you were still in the boat.

You have come back here because you want to know. Reflecting on the incident years later, it made no sense. But in this moment, washed up on the shore, you believe so much that Reno had saved you, that he had dove into the water and dragged you from your doom. But did it really happen that way? Are you certain?

Your Iris wakes you up the next day, swelling gentle orbs of light onto the inside of your eyelids until it becomes uncomfortably bright. You sit up and it takes a minute for you to realize where you are, fine mist still clinging to your eyelashes.

As you’re pulling on your socks, you hear the golf cart outside rev its dinky engine. You open the door to the parking lot, where Celine is waiting for you. You look to your right and you see Lomas squinting in the sunlight as well.

The lab is deserted when you walk inside, and you remember that it’s a Saturday. Celine leads you and Lomas to the elevator once again, but this time she swipes her ID and quickly presses the first floor button three times. The elevator jolts into motion, and your head becomes light. The ground through the glass begins to rise, shrouding you in darkness and confirming that you are, indeed, moving downward. Your body still hurts for sleep, but the descent drops your stomach and you shudder.

The elevator settles and the doors slide open. Lomas steps out first, his head craned up, and lets out a low whistle. He glances back at you and Celine. “Damn.”

The first thing to notice about this place is the height. The chamber you step into is huge, confusingly so: it seems just as tall as the lab when you were on its telescoping ground floor, as if in the time you’ve been in the elevator a large stage crew was replacing everything in sight, while you weren’t even moving at all. But this can’t be so. You grapple with the fact that this place must truly be underground, another vast space stacked right below where you were just standing.

The three of you walk to the middle of the chamber, much smaller than the plaza of the first floor. Encircling you are black walls that seem to glow; you realize upon second glance that what you are looking at are actually many, many computers, stacked up on one another to form steep cylindrical surfaces. Cool air circulates around the room and brushes against your skin. On the floor, thick desks are strewn with paper and sag under the weight of massive monitors.

In the opposite corner of the room, like the north notch of a compass, lies a small cavity with a sloping ceiling that converges at a flat, blank screen. Other monitors with tiny blue text hug the walls’ beveled corners. In the middle of this space you spot the Director, sitting in a black chair with his legs kicked up on the desk. He turns around and watches you approach, grinning and loosely holding a mug.

“Good morning, guys. Welcome to the office.”

Lomas’ expression stays steely. He eyes the mug, and you recall he hasn’t had any coffee today. “Is the explanation for how this works going to hurt my brain?”

“Jumping right into things, are we?” The Director shrugs and then looks at Celine. “I’ll let the principal researcher do the talking.”

Celine looks back to you and Lomas. “How familiar are you two with modern physics?”

You exchange glances. “Yeah, not very.”

She nods. “Okay. Um, I’ll give my best high-level description and just stop me when you have any questions. So this project—Laplace’s machine—has been in the works for decades. The theory was first proposed back in the nineties by the previous Director of this lab, Sergey Novikov. He imagined a machine built on a single, irrefutable truth: that the universe is inherently causal, and therefore deterministic. The world we live in is a product of the world that came before it, and it is the only possible product. If we gave our creation everything there is to know about the state of the universe, even for one instant, any instant, the rest of time and space could be known to us by extrapolation.

“The idea was pretty controversial at the time. Concurrently, Novikov was in the process of dismantling the canon that was quantum mechanics, disproving it with his own radical experiments—most of them done here at the lab, actually. Quantum logic inherently went against Novikov’s idea because it introduced randomness into the universe, an existence in which some things we could not definitively compute. But Novikov pioneered a new theory, seed theory, which broke quantum particles into smaller, more fundamental vectors, and developed equations that, while seemingly erratic, made the outcomes of their interactions predictable.”

She stops to catch her breath, leaving you to stare at her dumbly. You glance over at Lomas to see if he’s doing any better. He’s gazing at the machine, lost in thought.

“That’s a pretty big if, isn’t it?” He looks to Celine. “You said if you captured an instant where you knew everything about our universe, then you could extrapolate from there. Sure. But we just don’t have that kind of information, do we? I mean, we don’t even know what’s at the bottom of our oceans.”

Celine nods for a moment, collecting her thoughts. “Okay, good question. Well, that’s the other component of seed theory. It states that there exists a beginning of the universe, a point zero on the proverbial axis of time. This ‘seed’ of the universe occurs before what we call the big bang, when everything was at its most dense, when there was the most order. We pooled all our efforts and computational resources into identifying the seed, testing and refining combinations of particles until we extracted the true one. Once found, the rest was just a matter of implementation and design—now Laplace’s machine has grown into all that you see around you.”

Everyone takes a moment to soak up the machine again. You gaze at the glittering sky of blue lights and let out a low breath.

“You want to see it in motion?” the Director pipes up, reading your mind. He spins around in his chair and starts to type. The whole chamber surrounding you starts to hum and flicker, every inch of this massive computer coming to life. The blank screen flickers to life and illuminates a slate gray rectangle. Small, white numbers pour into the screen until it is filled, their values morphing into each other seamlessly. You walk closer and strain your eyes as each number blinks in and out of existence, replaced with one just as equally arbitrary. You look back at the Director, not sure what you should say.

“This is it?” You wince as the words come out of your mouth. Not that.

The Director lifts an eyebrow. “What, numbers?” His face, previously full and handsome, looks gaunt in the harsh illumination. “These numbers represent vectors of particles, their energy and their momentum, their position in reality. These numbers in particular show the obliteration of Earth when it is engulfed by the expanding sun, five billion years from now. These numbers can show you the trajectory of your life, the fate of your bloodline. These are the numbers, Jules.”

You nod your head tightly at him. Celine pipes up from behind you. “That being said, we do understand visualization would be nice,” she says, advancing toward the screen, turning and leaning on the desk so that her back is illuminated. “I’m leading a project designed to do just that.”

You try to wrap your head around what that would mean, everything that you could witness. A shiver runs through your body. “So we can see everything.”

“Well.” The Director leans back into his chair. “Not everything. We know the nature of every fundamental particle at every instant of time. That explains the formation of planets, the minutiae of a rainfall. But even with a perfect snapshot of someone’s brain chemistry, I cannot explain why they feel the way they do. The one thing my machine cannot understand—emotion.” He fixes his eyes on Lomas intensely. “That’s where you come in.”

The room freezes with those words. Lomas cannot speak for a moment, dumbstruck. “What?”

The Director’s calm demeanor doesn’t waver. “You loved someone, once,” he says brazenly. “Using Celine’s visualization algorithms, I want to give you closure, show you the truth. And in exchange, I want to study you.”

The two men stare at each other, with Celine the first to intercept. “I’m sorry, sir, but you didn’t tell me that we’d be performing a personal query today.” She glances at you, too, but you can’t give her any answers.

Lomas forces a burst of laughter, but quickly drops his smile, still in shock. “I don’t think this is a good idea,” he says softly.

“You’ve come all this way,” the Director replies.

“I thought this was about—you made it sound like—” Lomas, becoming more and more agitated, doesn’t finish his sentence and just shakes his head in silence. “I’m not interested,” he says, finality evident in his voice. “I’m sorry.”

The Director’s expression is indecipherable, but it strikes you as thoughtful rather than anything else. He swivels his chair away and shrugs. “Of course. I won’t force you into anything.”

Lomas looks taken aback. “I—I appreciate it.”

The Director waves his hand at Celine, his eyes glued to the screen. “In that case, then. Why don’t you show them more of the lab?”

Celine is similarly duped. “Should I—what?”

“Start with the library,” the Director says. “I need to finish up some work here.”

After a beat, Celine stands up and smoothes down her lab coat. She looks tersely at the both of you before heading back toward the elevator shaft. Inside, Celine presses the button for you and stands there wordlessly. You can tell that her bafflement has morphed into ire, though you’re not sure to whom it’s directed. After a moment, her glare pierces through her Iris, flickering to life. Lomas stares at his feet the whole way up.

The elevator slows to stop halfway up the building, and you follow Celine down a deserted hallway. Sturdy, industrial-looking doors pass by on your left, while on the right you’re walled in by a thick pane of glass. Peering through it, you can see floors with near-identical hallways spiraling below you, the same speckled tile and harsh LED lighting.

You catch Lomas’ eye in the reflection. “Are you okay, sir?”

He exhales loudly and rubs his eyes. “Shit, I need coffee.”

You are reminded of Axiom #3: Lomas cannot function without caffeine. The first thing you would do in the mornings is get him some coffee, so this does not bode well.

Celine stops in front of a door suddenly, and you halt alongside her. The placard beside the door is embossed with the letters #L0B. She says something about being big fans of Borges here, a statement so witty it momentarily breaks Lomas out of his spell and makes him chuckle. Then she swipes her card, the door handle lighting green, and lets you inside.

You get the sensation that you’ve just stepped back into Cambridge, sent somewhere on campus to fetch Lomas a book. The room is around two levels high, with rich mahogany bookshelves that curve around you. What you see filling them are not the spines of books, however; it takes a moment for you to figure it out, but you realize they’re brimming with piles of scrolls, bound paper spirals that bloom like a bouquet of roses from each chamber. The air is warmer here and smells woody and sweet. It’s all very jarring from the sterile hallway outside, but drastic tone shifts at the lab aren’t anything new anymore.

“Welcome to the library,” Celine says, leading you down the shelves to the open space in the center. “Here we keep a record of every simulation we’ve run on Laplace’s machine.”

You look around, taking in the heaps of scrolls. Glancing at Celine for permission, you slide out a tube from the nearest shelf labeled Ferns. The scroll itself is sealed with a strip of tape that has a large, scrawled number. You undo the tape and gingerly unroll the thick paper. Inside is a wall of small, inky numbers, just like the ones you saw flash on the screen down in the machine room. It’s exactly what you were expecting and still a perplexing sight.

“Don’t tell me you can read this,” you say.

She shrugs. “Once you get the hang of it, it’s not as hard as it looks. The syntax has a top-down design, so events are easily abstracted.”

You study the scroll again, the numbers still meaningless. Behind you, Lomas mumbles something about wanting to look around on his own, and Celine lifts a yielding hand. He wanders off and disappears into an aisle. You roll the scroll up carefully and slip it back, suddenly very aware it’s just you and Celine.

“I don’t want to sound rude, but . . . why print all of this? Can’t it just be saved on a computer?”

Celine smiles dryly. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the Director likes his theatrics.” Her mouth twitches as she stares at the walls of scrolls surrounding her.

You chuckle weakly. “Yeah, whatever just happened back there—that was theatrical as hell.”

You instantly wish you hadn’t said it. Celine flushes red. “He really should have told me he was going to do that,” she says apologetically. The contempt you saw in the elevator floods back into her expression. “God, I wish he would tell me anything. Sometimes I don’t know how he expects me to do my job.”

You cast your eyes above you, where Lomas has gotten himself onto the second floor and is now lurking through shelves. You think back to Axiom #1.

“Somehow I think I know exactly what you mean.”

Celine exhales, studying you carefully, and then she seems to soften. With a blink, she closes her Iris and motions you down an aisle. “Come on, let me show you some of the things we keep around here.”

Celine leads you around the first floor, showing you various scrolls of interest. She tries to teach you how to read them, too, dissecting what she calls the “parent vectors,” but after a couple fruitless efforts on your part she drops the cause. Her explanation of what each represents is more than enough. You find the difference in magnitude striking; some, like the one you randomly plucked off the shelf, record endearingly short events. Things like the life cycle of plants or a bird egg hatching can be verified easily within the lab’s walls, Celine tells you. And then there are the big events, ones that recount the formation and destruction of stars, the beginning of the universe. When you read the labels of these scrolls, which droop under their own weight, your stomach can’t help but drop. Celine points out a particularly battered scroll, already splayed open on a table, and mentions that the destruction of the Earth is one of the Director’s favorites.

You stare at the scroll’s contents, the numbers a little faded from repeated unrollings. You wonder how anyone could work on this machine and keep sane. “Can I ask, um. Are you—”

A crashing sound from upstairs interrupts you. Lomas peeks his head out behind a railing from the balcony. “Sorry, sorry,” he says hurriedly. “I just—I tried to—”

“It’s okay, they’re really heavy,” Celine says. You follow her up the stairs. Lomas is stooped down and picking books off the floor, the first actual books you’ve seen in this library. They do look pretty hefty, with thick bindings in rich colors.

He shoves them back into the shelf, looking embarrassed. “I can’t read them,” he offers. Celine tells him it’s fine another time and then Lomas slinks off again.

You approach the bookshelf as one book threatens to tumble over. You catch it before it does and hold it up to the light. It’s dark blue, embossed with a single word in gold. Celine.

You stare at the letters. Then you look at her. She looks back awkwardly. “You can look,” she says finally. You open it and thumb through a few pages, each covered in an unyielding mass of numbers, stacked like bricks.

“If you’re really special, you get a book,” Celine says softly from behind you. She points to the first book on the bookshelf, where there’s around five in total. “That red one’s the Director. And then the one after that is the previous Director, Sergei.” She touches a green book, slimmer than the rest. “This last one is for the Director’s late brother, Theo. You saw a picture of him earlier.”

The weight in your hands feels paralyzing. “Have you read all of it?” you ask her.

She glances back at the book in your hands. “I’ve read some,” she says, chewing her lip. “Once you get past the present, it’s a little addicting. But I made myself stop, eventually. I had seen enough.” You notice there’s a thin gold bookmark sticking out the top, what you gauge to be sixty percent into it. You turn the book in your hands over and over, simultaneously impressed by her self-restraint and horrified by what she could have read to make her stop. A fresh sense of alarm is unfolding out of your body, all the anxiety that has been collecting since your arrival suddenly becoming unbearable.

“How can you deal with this?” you ask, unable to keep your voice from exposing your dread. “How can you go to work every day knowing that this book is here, too? Knowing that you can’t change anything it says. That none of your choices matter.”

Celine blinks, stunned by your reaction. She’s quiet for a while, considering the question. “All of my choices matter,” she says finally. “Our actions are always informed by the circumstances of our past. That means there is a reason for everything, a world I am building. That book right there is proof of that. It gives me intention. It hands me a promise.” She walks over to your side and takes her book from your hands, re-shelves it next to the others. “It’ll be okay,” she says. “I promise.”

Your knuckles burn where her fingers had momentarily brushed them. But it’s enough to siphon away your fear, like a lightning rod grounding you to reality. When you experience it this time, you are surprised at how quickly the moment passes, how briefly her hand touches yours, an action sewn together with the lightest thread. You go back and feel it again.

There’s a day you have in mind, many years in the future. Here, reading is seen as an antiquated skill, but you are old and used to your ways. You scroll through news articles on your Iris, now called OEIs (Ocular Enhancement Implants) per the new government regulations. The name has never felt right to you, and the interface is foreign, unnatural. Your generation once pioneered this technology, and now it slips more out of your grasp with every update cycle.

An article catches your attention, an obituary. The name means nothing, but a location sticks out to you in the brief preview of the article, a place you can almost locate in your mind. After a few mis-selects, you pull the article up and skim over the opening words. Something in your head clicks. Every sentence dredges up images, sounds, even smells that you can barely hold onto. You can envision the laboratory they mention, the towering structure with those incredible chambers, the things you witnessed during that faraway weekend. You had met the deceased when you were a young man. He had held the position of Director for nearly thirty years, says the article, practically working up until his death. The article details his most significant discoveries, the impact he made on the field of physics overall, and his education at the same university you had worked at all those years ago.

She takes up barely more than a sentence near the end, but when you read her name, the entirety of her becomes vividly real. The article quotes her sentiment to continue the lab’s most ambitious and groundbreaking work, to honor her predecessor’s legacy. You read the sentence again and bask in every syllable, each a kernel of new information, proof that she has continued to exist beyond that weekend.

Eventually you close out of the article and wonder if memories can ever just belong to the past. All those times you’ve replayed each interaction in your head, poring over scrolls together in that labyrinth of a library or taking towels out of her arms. Weren’t you changing them a little every time? Every fresh coat of paint a slightly different color, so much so that now you aren’t even sure if the words she says to you are hers or your own invention.

And then you think back to that space below the ground, where there exists a single version of that weekend that is true. You wonder if he ever discovered what it all meant. You wonder if she knows now, too.

The next stop in the tour is a place Celine calls the greenhouse. This room stretches higher and longer than the confines of the library, with windows for walls and marble ceiling panels that diffuse daylight into soft, golden pools. Thick trees sprout from the soil floor and stretch to the ceiling, casting dappled shadows at your feet. Lining the pathways that cross the ground are the most verdant, lush ferns you’ve ever seen. They spill onto the walkway, threatening to trip you on any misplaced step, though Celine winds her way through like it’s nothing. She stoops down to show you a tag attached to the base of a fern, and you think back to the scrawled numbers on the fern scrolls in the library. You kneel down next to her and listen to her talk about the symbiotic relationship between the shady trees and temperate ferns; Lomas stays standing, gazing upward at the trees, his head evidently somewhere else.

Eventually, Celine notices this too. She follows his gaze to a small glass enclosure that juts out of the glass wall, connected to the ground by a ladder. “Our magpie roost,” she explains, getting up and brushing soil off her palms. “We can go up if you want. The view is nice.”

Lomas eyes the enclosure warily. “Animals aren’t really my thing.”

Celine shrugs and turns to you, and you nod tentatively. Together you make your way toward the enclosure. At the base of the ladder, she takes off her lab coat and stuffs it into a basket on the floor. “Might want to leave any shiny things down here. Otherwise, be prepared to fight for it.”

You hastily unclip your ID and deposit it before climbing after her, leaving Lomas by himself. You emerge into a small enclosure with an eclectic collection of mirrors, aluminum sheets, and other metallic surfaces sitting at your feet. Wooden birdhouses hang neatly down an aisle of shrubs, though you’re not sure if any are currently holding birds. Seconds later, a chattering screech answers your question for you.

“Why magpies?” you ask Celine, who is cooing into a box. She reaches in and extracts a black and white bird, which fluffs its wings impatiently.

“In terms of testing, they’re more sophisticated than ferns, I suppose. But I think the Director just likes birds.” She strokes its down and you notice a small tag poking out on one of its legs. “Did you know a magpie can recognize itself in a mirror? They’re smart things.”

The magpie glowers at you and you edge away, approaching the edge of the enclosure where the walls slant down until all that stands between you and a plummet down the side of the lab is a knee-high barrier. From this vantage point, you can see a dizzying lay of the land: the residences across the field, the forest rolling away from you, and a sizable body of water you hadn’t noticed last night. The oblong orb shimmers slightly in the cloudy afternoon sun, specks of people orbiting slowly around the perimeter.

Celine joins you and follows your gaze. “Oh, yea. Lake Novikov.” Her watchful expression is almost scornful. You stay silent, not wanting to admit to your phobia of bodies of water that has been instilled since childhood. The lake is a tiny marble from here, but still dread twists into your stomach like a knife.

Celine must mistake your silence for judgment, though, and quickly amends her words. “There’s nothing wrong with it. I just—I grew up around the ocean, and it isn’t really the same.” Wind blasts into the enclosure and Celine wraps her arms around her coatless body. You try to imagine her as a young girl, on the beaches of some infinite ocean.

“Have you ever considered leaving the lab?” you ask her.

She blinks at you and then quickly shifts her eyes away. “No, never.” She stands there with crossed arms, shivering. “The work I lead here is . . . irreplicable.”

“So you think the Director’s doing the right thing,” you say.

She gives you a strange look. “It doesn’t matter what I think.”

“Sure it does. You’re principal researcher.”

She shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter what I think,” she repeats, backing away from the ledge and toward the exit. You turn her words over in your head until the cursing starts.

You look over, and Celine balks down the ladder. “What happened?” you ask.

“He fucking took the jacket,” she says, then swings down at a speed that makes you fear for her safety. You clamber down after her. When you reach the floor, you see that the coat is indeed missing from the basket, and only your small keychain and ID remain. Celine looks around wildly, but Lomas is long gone. “Where did he go?” she asks you, panicked.

You don’t want to tell her you have no idea. Celine, getting this anyway, groans and starts to pace. You open your Iris and attempt to check his location and send him a message, both to no avail. Your face starts to burn. You rack your brain, retracing the steps you took today, desperately trying to figure out why Lomas went rogue.

Then it hits you. “Wait. I think I know where he is.”

You tell her and she gives you an exasperated look, but you can tell she is convinced. “I cannot believe—okay, listen, we need to intercept him as soon as possible.” Her face contorts in concentration. “But without my ID . . . I’ll have to go down to security, where I can check the cameras. If you’re right, I can give you temporary swipe access, and then you’re going to go in there and get him out.” She waves a finger at your face. “And noneof this reaches the Director, do you hear me?”

You split up. Celine descends to the security office, and you hustle up flights of stairs until you reach the floor you’re looking for. You race down the sterile hallways, passing endless, identical doors, but eventually you reach the three letters you’ve been repeating to yourself in your head and you find yourself at the entrance to the library once again.

Celine’s plight takes longer, and so you stand there with only the sound of your breath until she finally pings you and tells you to go in. You swipe your card like Celine had done and the handle lights up green. You lean your body weight into the door and enter quietly.

Warm air rushes to meet you as you walk through the rows of shelves. Your eyes are trained on the second floor, and soon enough the tails of Lomas’ brown overcoat appear, swaying slightly from the balcony. You advance up the staircase, unable to decipher his motion, until you stand at the top. You cough awkwardly. Lomas jerks around, hiding his hands in the folds of his jacket before you can catch what he’s holding.

“Jules. Hi.” He looks around, confirming you’re alone.

“What are you reading, sir?” You crane your neck slightly to the side, and he turns with you.

“It’s nothing.”

You shift your weight back and glance around. This situation would be almost comical, you think, if the circumstances were any less bizarre. “For what it’s worth,” you try, “I think the Director’s proposition is insane too. Y’know, trying to . . . solve you.”

Lomas scoffs. “That’s his plan? He thinks he can just look at the chemicals in my brain and know love. He thinks it’s that easy.” He fixes his gaze on you now, with a chilling intensity. “Do you know what love is, Jules?”

You swallow. “No, sir.”

“Well, it isn’t this.” He gestures at the table between you, strewn with unrolled scrolls. “Numbers. It’s more than numbers; it defies them.” He takes a breath, looking pained. “Love is wading into a river and giving yourself to the current. It’s choosing against what makes sense, what is safe.” His voice is heightened, now, his expression agitated, daring you to respond. All you can do, however, is slide your eyes from his face to his exposed hands, which clutch a thin, green book. Celine’s words echo in your ears, and you can picture her next to you, pointing out the spine, explaining its contents. Your eyes slide back to Lomas and the dots connect themselves for you.

“You loved him,” you say. “Theo.”

Lomas’ silence is enough. You nod at the book. “How did he . . . ?”

“A boating accident,” Lomas answers, averting your gaze. “He was alone. I told him not to go.”

“Oh,” you say. The words sink in. “Oh.”

Lomas looks down at his hands, and you realize he had been reading the last few pages of Theo’s book. You imagine him poring over the numbers, trying to pick apart their meaning, to comprehend the death of a person through the trajectory of his atoms. It occurs to you now how weary Lomas must feel, to be thrust into such a trip, to be given such a decision.

“I can’t bear to watch him die,” he says, his voice barely above a hoarse whisper, “but do I owe it to him? He deserves to have someone with him, right? Even like this.” He looks up at you imploringly, and when you meet his eyes you are stunned to realize that Lomas is truly seeking your direction.

All those times you waited for Lomas to ask for your opinion, and now finally when he does you find yourself unsure to speak. You take a breath. “Sir, I think you’re the only one who can make that decision.” You stop and think about the Director, about his almighty ability to relive what was, simulate what wasn’t. “But I would remember that he can go back and forth, and we can’t. We only do things once.”

You wonder if you should say more, but Lomas’ face shifts in a way that tells you he understands. You give him the time he needs. And then it’s time to go.

You jump to a little over a year in the future. You are hovering at the doorway to Lomas’ office, clutching an envelope and watching him read at his desk. It doesn’t take long for him to notice you and with a raise of an eyebrow you are propelled inside.

“Jules,” Lomas says. His face is clean-shaven, a rare occurrence. When he stands, you notice he’s ditched the usual grimy brown suit for a clean, pressed black one. “This is a surprise.”

You shift your weight from foot to foot. “I just wanted to check in, sir. How was the service?”

Lomas rubs his nonexistent stubble. “Oh, it was good. Nice to see people again.” You both stare at his desk, newly lavished with several bouquets of flowers. He chuckles. “The entire time, all I could think about was how much he would have despised having two of ’em. Would have called it pointless.”

You shrug. “Well, a lot has happened since the first one.”

Lomas grunts in agreement, then nods toward your hand. “What do you have there?” “Oh.” You look down at the envelope, creased by your tight grip. “It’s . . . actually my two weeks’ notice.” You brace for a reaction. He doesn’t do much, just stares at you curiously. You clear your throat. “It’s been a great two years, sir, really, but . . . ”

“But you need to move on. Understandable,” Lomas finishes for you. He holds out his hand and takes the envelope from you, glancing over it for a second before discarding it on the desk. “No one wants to be an assistant forever, Jules,” he says, looking amused.

“Yeah,” you agree.

You look down again, at a loss for any more words. Underneath the flowers and cups of to-go coffee—Axiom #3—a familiar color peeks out. You take a moment to recall where you’ve seen that dark green with golden trim before, and even as you recognize it as Theo’s book it feels jarring to see it here, as if a year ago the lab was a set and Lomas had stolen a prop from the production.

Lomas follows your gaze to his desk. “Oh, right. You’re probably wondering about that.”

The machine room is just as dazzlingly tall and cold as you remember. You and Lomas walk to the center of the room, where Celine is standing with her arms crossed, speaking to a seated Director. They turn around to spot you in unison.

The Director’s eyes light up. “I’m glad you’ve come around,” he says, sounding pleased. Your eyes meet Celine’s, and her strained smile tightens.

Lomas stands there awkwardly as you all wait for him to speak. He searches for words for a few seconds before giving up, raising his arms half-heartedly and just saying, “Show me.”

The Director nods. He turns in his chair toward the desk, starting to type rapidly. The walls blink to life and a resonant hum courses through the room, just like the first time you were here. You realize with a jolt that that was only this morning. Today has felt longer than you thought possible.

You locate Celine, who has migrated to her own desk. She catches your eye and nudges her head toward the empty chair next to her, a silent invitation. You leave Lomas in the center of the room. His eyes are glued on the screen, which first flashes with chunks of garbled text and then slowly fills with the numbers you’ve seen so much of today. Next to you, Celine works at her monitor, her Iris-lit eyes darting across the screen. “I really hope this works,” she whispers to you.

You look at her. “You don’t know?”

She clacks away some more. “I can’t remember everything I read.”

From this angle, Lomas’ back is the only dark shape against the white rectangle of numbers. The humming around you has grown surprisingly loud, and you watch the Director study Lomas’ face. His lips move and Lomas dips his head in a small nod. Then, the Director cranes his head and yells, “It’s all you!”

Celine takes a deep breath and taps her keyboard. The screen freezes instantly, numbers vanishing. An image appears and rapidly starts to refine, bright blocks of color growing edges and definition, then flushing with texture and shading. You begin to recognize what you see. Swaths of deep blue focus into frozen hills of water and fill up the bottom half of the screen, their crests brushing up against a dull, stormy sky. Far away, a small bright shape perches on the side of a wave at a treacherous angle. A boat.

Your hands, suddenly very clammy, ball up, and your nails dig into your lap. The water, of course, unnerves you, but there’s something more. It’s almost like you’re sitting in a theater, but something about this image is uncannily unlike a photograph, something unnamable. Whatever it is, it does not faze Celine, who stares at the screen with triumph blazing in her eyes. With another keystroke, she sends it all catapulting into action. Millions of gallons of water shift all at once, their static rushing toward you, potent sound you were not prepared for. On screen, perfect arcs of water crash into each other like cymbals, destroying and reforming each other endlessly. In the center, the white boat plunges into the troughs of the ocean, nearly overturning, before being thrown skyward again.

Lomas stands there, and his posture is almost majestic, as if he is the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog waiting to be swallowed by the toppling waves. You want to reach out and drag him back, but the sight of such an immense body of water is paralyzing. Instead you watch him advance forward, mesmerization in each slow footstep.

“Closer,” the Director commands from the front of the room. He and Celine share a glance, their expressions brimming with the same electricity. Celine sends the scene gliding forward, through foamy spray and clear sheets of water, until the boat takes up most of the screen. You bob up and down with it, the dizziness is almost unbearable. You close your eyes for a few seconds, and when you open them, a man is standing on the boat. He’s fruitlessly tugging at ropes, dodging surges of water that crash onto the deck. Lomas is so close at this point that he obscures a good part of the screen, but you can still catch glimpses of the man’s face as he ricochets across the deck like a ragdoll. It is unmistakably the third person you saw in that old photo, with the likeness of a young Director and an expression contorted with fear. It’s Theo, brought back to life, and now about to die in front of you.

Despite your phobia, the authenticity of this moment amazes you. And yet every time his boat just barely misses capsizing, your heart seizes, anticipating the one time it doesn’t. You tear your eyes away from the screen and whisper to Celine. “How long until . . . ?”

She studies her monitor. “Not long. Maybe a minute.” She looks over to you and notices your agitation. “Are you doing okay?” You grit your teeth and nod, watching the seconds tick up on her computer, feeling your heartbeat ring in synchronization.

When the boat finally does overturn, it does so within a wave, so that you cannot see the body fall out of the vessel. It’s such a small moment, something you didn’t even realize happened until the white underbelly of the boat surfaces seconds later. And then you realize it happened, it’s over. The scene plays out for a few more seconds before Celine halts the simulation, freezing the sea’s wrath, silencing the roar to a dull hum.

You look over to Lomas and realize he is on his knees. He stays down for a while, small and unmoving. Then he staggers to his feet and speaks to the Director in low tones. The Director ponders whatever was said and then turns back to the computer. He makes the ocean on screen disappear, replacing it with white numbers once more. He also waves his hand at Celine, who scrambles at her own desk and types fervently.

She enters a command and the screen blushes with calm, pink skies, where you can soon make out sand, hear the sound of wind rushing through trees and waves lapping on shore. Eventually you see the body. It is mercifully in the distance, far enough away to obscure the inevitable mess, and instead it looks like Theo is sleeping.

You look at Lomas, suddenly nervous. He says something to the Director, who looks at him curiously. Together they study the Director’s computer, and the Director traces a stretch of numbers with his finger. Lomas touches them too, grazing them softly while the Director tears out a scrap from a spare notebook and hands it to him with a pen.

A seagull caws somewhere, musical and distant. Lomas’ hand closes over the pen, his silhouette arching over as he starts to write.

“You know,” Lomas says, back in his office, still looking at you looking at the book, “It’s not like he can’t make another one. It’s a souvenir, just like the coordinates.”

You can’t tear your eyes away from Theo’s book. “But you can’t—?”

“Nope. I don’t want to, either. Sentimental purposes only.”

“Oh.” You crease your brow, memories of that weekend still flooding in, flashes of her. “Would . . . you go back there, sir? To use the machine again, maybe see the future this time.”

Lomas looks amused. “You’re that worried about your future, huh?” You shrug, not bothering to correct him. He looks at you thoughtfully. “No, I don’t think I would. Of course there are events I’d be curious to see. But I think I’m done meddling with the order of things. Besides,” he adds, “I doubt I’ll ever get the opportunity. I don’t think either one of us will visit that basement ever again.”

You mull over this for a while and then Lomas reaches over to clap your shoulder. “You’ll figure something out. Doesn’t have to be today, though. Enjoy your day off, kid.”

You give him an appreciative smile as you go, looking back a final time when you reach the doorway. “I’m glad you found him, Lomas.”

“Me too,” he says, and then you leave.

You can’t sleep. Back at the residencies, you toss and turn in your bed and stare at the cracked ceiling, the day’s events engraving themselves into your memory like a vinyl plate. The ocean you witnessed only a few hours ago rushes to devour you, a violent, familiar weightlessness overtaking your body, and in the murky darkness all you can make out are boats and scrolls and white numbers.

At some point you can’t take it anymore. You swing your legs off the bed, move past the takeout boxes you had half-heartedly accepted earlier that evening, and exit the room. Outside, the sky is the clearest it’s been all weekend, and the moon hangs low, milky and nearly full. You walk toward the desolate parking lot and stop just short of it, taking a seat on a nearby bench that basks in the glow of yellow lamp light. You think about what she’s doing: if there’s a chance she could be up at this hour, too.

A rustling on your left interrupts your train of thought. You hold your breath as you scrutinize the source of the sound, anticipating a buffalo, maybe. Eventually a human-sized figure emerges instead, shuffling along the gravel path. You strain your eyes and realize a little too late that it’s the Director. He spots you around the same time and waves, gesturing you over. Your heart sinks.

“Can’t sleep either?” he asks you once you trudge over. You shrug and mumble something agreeable. The Director’s eyes glint golden, reflecting the lamps. “I like to walk this path during my bouts of insomnia. There’s a lake nearby, good for thinking. I can show you.”

You follow him along the path, passing through clusters of pine trees. Soon, reeds sprout in fistfuls from the earth and water comes into view, still like glass. The Director descends through the soft grass of the bank and stands at a small dock at the edge of the lake. You hover a few feet behind him.

He glances back. “You know, Jules, you’re the only one who didn’t need to be here this weekend.” You say nothing. His tone irks you, but you cannot deny the statement is true. He continues: “But, well, you’re here. And if you have questions, you might as well ask them.”

You look up at him carefully, unsure if he’s serious. His eyes tell you that he is. You swallow, thinking about everything that’s happened today, the new world order to which you have become privy. You think about all the things you could ask him, like what your life will look like, how it will end. How it will all end. But then it occurs to you that even if you did ask all of those questions, you’re not sure you’d want to hear the answer.

So instead you ask something else. “Alright. I have a question about your big problem, or whatever you call it. Why people think and feel the way they do.” The Director inspects the rocks at his feet as you knit your thoughts together carefully. “If the machine knows everything that will happen, it knows whether you solve your problem. So can’t you just check? If you succeed, you get the answer from the future. And if you don’t, well . . . you don’t.”

The Director skips a stone across the lake’s surface, and the water ripples out like fireworks. “You’re smarter than you look, Jules,” he says quietly.

You frown and decide not to respond to that.

He looks up at you and grins. “I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone, okay? I do come to an answer. I’ve checked. Of course I’ve checked. But for whatever reason, I—I keep it in my head. Never write it down or speak it out loud. Can you believe that?” He chuckles and shakes his head at the stars, as if chiding some cheeky celestial force. “The one secret I have to know, left in the one safe I cannot unlock.”

He lets out a theatrical yawn and drops his rocks, brushing by you as he walks up the bank. When you look up he looms tall on the path’s elevated plane. His face, moments ago expressive and almost tender, now reminds you of a mask. “I’ll be on my way back to the lab, then. Good night, Jules.”

You give a slight nod and watch him disappear. Invisible crickets chirp softly around you, cradled within the reeds. You walk up the bank and start in the opposite direction, a tingling exhaustion finally washing over your limbs; you make your way toward the residences, toward sleep, and toward morning.

This morning, the package arrives. When the bell rings, you open the door and look to your feet. You can’t recall ordering anything recently, but the box is unassuming enough to pick up, and you turn it over carefully in your hands, inspecting each blank side. Perhaps you were written a new back pain prescription, you wonder, or your nephew had sent you a gift from abroad. But then you bring the box into the kitchen and slice it open; the flaps unfold to reveal another sleek white box, which when shimmied apart reveals the small, silver chip, and you realize this isn’t a regular delivery at all.

On the third day, your Iris wakes you up a quarter before eight. Celine said she’d be there on the hour and arrives exactly on time, just as you are cramming the last of your clothes into your bag. You step outside and morning fog creeps in from the edges of the horizon, thick enough to obscure the surrounding forest and swallow the path to the lake that you visited mere hours ago.

You ride to the main parking lot, everyone sleepily silent. Upon arrival you notice the Director is nowhere in sight. Celine gives Lomas an apologetic look as she takes the keys out of the vehicle.

“He must have overslept. It was an exhausting weekend.”

If Lomas can sense the generosity in her statement, he doesn’t seem to care. He acknowledges her words with a dazed shrug and then gets into the driver’s seat of the car, not bothering to glance behind him.

You are left to load bags in the trunk with Celine. You move your luggage with your heart in your throat, knowing your time is running out. Celine closes the trunk with a thud, and then you turn to face her squarely.

“Come with us.”

She stares at you. “What?”

“Come with us. Leave the lab, leave everything, and make a new life in Boston. You don’t have to be controlled by the machine or the Director anymore.”

She looks at you sadly. “Jules, I can’t.”

“Yes, you can.” Your voice trembles with urgency, startling both of you. “We can get you a job at the university. You’re smart enough, you’re definitely qualified enough. You’d be happy there. You can visit the ocean every day.”

She searches your face, and you can tell your proposal is getting through, that she is imagining your proposed future. For a suspended moment you stare at each other, and you truly believe that you have convinced her.

But then she breaks your gaze, and you know her answer before she can even say anything. “You don’t have to rescue me, Jules,” she says gently. “I can take care of myself.” She watches your expression deflate and reaches out to rest her hand on your wrist. “The lab is where I belong. It always has been.” Her words hold no malice, no speculation, no bite. She says them so simply that it leaves you no doubt that they are just true.

She lets go of your arm and you straighten up, clear your throat. Lomas turns on the engine, the car breathing to life, and you struggle to find words to leave her with.

“I hope our paths cross again someday.” She smiles at you ruefully. The way her face looks as you leave her is already searing into your mind.

“Yes,” she says. “I hope so, too.”

The weekend is ending. You wonder if you should just pause and exit right here, with Celine still standing so close to you. But you let yourself get into the car, feel the ground rumble beneath you, her figure receding to nothing in the side view mirror. You wind through the forest, down gravel roads, toward civilization. And then finally you leave your body in the past and open your eyes in the present.

You sit at your kitchen table, back in your apartment, right where you started. In its absence, the vividness of the past startles you; now, the present feels dull, colorless. Your window curtains stir, leaking darkness. How long have you been sitting here? Everything had happened so quickly; mechanically, you had brushed back the hair behind your left ear, inserted the silver chip into the thin slot in your head, and waited for the click, just as you’ve done for countless other Iris updates over the years. When the interface launched, you dragged your finger in the air, sliding the playhead back to the beginning and taking the course of your life with it.

If you had the power to go anywhere, at any time, where would you go? Why has the answer always been that weekend? You breathe quietly, memories freshly unraveled in front of you, dead emotions sprung to life again. You close your eyes, stuck in a different kind of past. You have never escaped her. Her smiling at you, brushing your hand with hers, touching your wrist. Her expression as you left the lab’s campus, that quiet resignation and dignity etched onto her face. Her standing alone at the very bottom of the machine room, the years slipping through her fingers, breezing through her hair, until she had become what she had once so despised. In the moments between that weekend you have seen how it all connects, and yet you still find yourself with no further answers, just remembered questions and renewed pain.

Your eyes flutter open again, and they drift across the dim room to the white box. You hold your gaze, struck by a moment of steadying clarity. You had become so preoccupied by what this chip had shown you that you had forgotten to ask why? And by whom? But now they beat in your head like a drum, echoed by your thumping heartbeat. An answer flutters to your mind, and it feels unreal.

You reach across the table. The delicate layers of the box peel back easily, your hands moving through the thin tissue paper and light styrofoam like water. It takes some time, some shifting and tilting, but finally the slip of paper clunks against the lip of the box. Your breath catches in your chest as you pick it up. It’s neatly creased in half, and you take a second to hold it lightly in your fingers, savoring its potential. It is everything it could be: a world unto itself, that neither you nor anyone else can decipher yet or even describe. Maybe not even her.

About the Author

Isabel Lee is a writer, artist, and creative technologist from Chicago, Illinois. Her interests include exploring the intersections between code, art, and fiction. She also enjoys painting and watching Korean thriller movies. Isabel is currently a senior at Yale University, and this is her first publication in a major literary magazine.

Ask the Fireflies

R. P. Sand

They say the universe was created when a Giant lit a matchstick. That her great sigh fanned the flames that danced and wept into stars and constellations. They say some seas are blue and Slugs are naturally submissive. They also say that I cannot exist. But what do they know? These are truths or untruths contorted through generations, whispers leaping from ear to ear, unrecognizable from their original form. They are irrelevant to me.

The only truth I know, the only truth I care about is that Alshea is not “as good as dead.” Those in mint jumpsuits with low, measured voices that bounce off scarcely used eardrums—always an odd sensation, that—do not know what they are talking about.

No, Alshea is not as good as dead, how could she be? Proof is in how she is perched at the garden table, cheeks flushed despite the little bruise above her brow, eyes sparkling alertness, propped up on the soft feather pillow Norai sewed because the wrought iron chair is not high enough for her. Proof is in how vivaciously she regales her version of the Old Earth tale “The Little Wizard Who Lived” to her stuffed unicorn and me, pouring caramel tea in our periwinkle cups. Proof is in how the colors of a setting star soak rainbows into her dark hair and skin, how the breeze catches any loose strands and hair ribbons, how she blooms like the red valerian spangled in our garden, so sharp and so vibrant. So alive.

“Up, Podder! Prep the table for dinner.” Norai’s feathery voice dissipates my reverie. My whiskers twitch at the scent of warm butter; she wheels the dinner cart down the cobblestone path from the manor house. The purple cats at our feet stir at the promise of food. Tiers of perfectly creased cloth napkins, white dishes with painted lilies, unicorn cookies, buttered rolls, and: do I smell Norai’s hot chocolate? Her cinnamon-tulsi-peppermint blend is why Tedna, the gardener, sometimes stays for dinner, and locals like the baker and candlestick maker deliver themselves rather than send shop runners.

When I eye the chocolate pot longingly, but reach instead for the dishes, Norai suppresses a smile under half-moon spectacles, and her gray-mauve lips and rice paper wings of the same color flutter amusedly. The wings are small on her round, petite frame but she can hover a few feet off the ground, though she hardly ever does.

I prep the table in a way that meets the approval of Norai’s precise eye, and she lays the food, appropriately punctuating Alshea’s continuous string of commentary and tale-bits with “oh really”s and “how lovely”s. She allows a few crumbs to drop to the grass, which the cats love.

“And he who cannot be named got hiccups so he couldn’t swallow his tea,” Alshea is saying when a sudden chill erupts through her. I immediately extend my paws but Norai drapes her yellow-fringed shawl across Alshea’s thin shoulders first.

“Giant save me, it’s chilly tonight, isn’t it?” Norai says. “Lucky I’ve got just the remedy for that.”

“I’ll pour?” I say waving to the pot, and once Norai nods, it is not long before Alshea clutches a steaming mug between her palms.

The star streaks crimson and ultramarine behind Alshea as it settles behind the horizon, and little flickers of light emerge from the moss-covered trellises. It is Alshea’s favorite part of the day, the changing of the sky and the emergence of the fireflies. They drift toward us, drawn to our heat. Some break away down a path that cuts through lilac bushes, pooling around Tedna after another day of him tending the grounds of our Manor Flammel. Tedna: brown hair combed to one side, shirt moderately unbuttoned under a pale cardigan, a loosened bow tie, trousers patched with dirt, and shovel slung over a shoulder.

Fireflies and lilacs. Trousers and bow ties. Things Alshea taught me about, elements pieced together from the holobooks she spent much of her young life immersed in, recreated tales from Old Earth, like “Beauty and the Frog King” and “The Wheel of the Shire” and “The Man of Iron and His White Wolf.” She spent hour after hour in the holodecks, hours that would arguably be better spent studying or playing or interacting with parents. But options were limited when you were the only child on the MarkX21 mining station and your father was Station Commander and your mother was a holofilm star who was more often than not away for work.

Cats and stuffed unicorns. Cobblestone paths and manors. The Archipelago—a planetary assortment with New New Earth as its nucleus, framed by secondary planets and their mining moons, like MarkX21—did not harbor such things. A pity, really, because they are beautiful. We are lucky to have them here.

Tedna ruffles Alshea’s hair with his characteristic, “How do, little neighbor?” and reaches for a roll, his hands stained with dirt.

“The nerve! Get yourself sanitized, you sneak,” Norai says, lightly rapping his knuckles with a spoon handle. “And you might as well collect that blazer you always switch into from the mud room—leave the cardigan behind, I’ll wash it—and fetch Alshea’s riding hood.”

“And Podder’s scarf!” Alshea pipes in.

A short while later the four of us are seated, Tedna appropriately clean and blazered, Alshea in her riding hood, red as nasturtiums, and Norai draped once again in her yellow-fringed shawl. I wear my simple black robe and striped scarf, though only because Alshea likes how it looks around my neck; my fur is enough to protect me from temperature fluctuations.

The fireflies flit to candles at the center of the table, and Alshea lunges to grab one, but it slips away from her cupped hands. She laughs, and we laugh with her.

“Star set’s pretty tonight,” Alshea says.

“Agreed,” says Norai. “I’d capture it with paint, if I could; look at how those streaks interlock so, like the baker’s beard.”

“You paint?” Alshea asks, eyes widening. “I want to paint.”

Norai chuckles. “Well, it was lifetimes ago. I learned when I was your age.”

“Tomorrow,” I say. “On the return from the doctor’s we can purchase paints and its relevant accessories.”

Alshea frowns, eyes focusing on the smooth strokes of Norai’s hands buttering rolls. The girl shifts uneasily, and I know it is at the thought of visiting the doctor, the worry that ve might place her in the cold and dark sarcophagus—the cylindrical medical instrument used to stimulate healing.

“It’s only a little bruise!” she’d screamed at me when we fought earlier in the day. She threw a cushion, and I resisted the urge to chuckle. A little cushion is no match for a creature who towered over her. I caught it, careful to avoid tangling the pillow’s tassels in my claws, and placed it gently on her bed.

“Little, indeed. Which is why we wait for an appointment tomorrow. But it is your head,” I said. I imagined she deeply regretted jumping on the bed.

“It’d be something to look forward to, no?” Norai says. “Podder has a great idea don’t you think, jaan?”

Eventually Alshea perks up when Tedna lists the glorious things she could paint, the star set, the rock garden, the cats, the fireflies. The fireflies that help keep at bay darkness and Nightfall. Her excitement is infectious, and the table buzzes with ideas and banters and the occasional meow from underneath.

I interject a comment here and there, but mostly I watch Alshea, aware of her sudden dopamine surge at the thought of painting. The inevitable adumbration falls over her eyes, as it so often does when she’s extra excited, and I witness her struggle to ignore it. I do not need to look at her face to know when the shadow of saudade, the shadow of immeasurable longing, descends; I know everything about Alshea’s state even if my eyes are closed.

“She will come as soon as she can,” I say softly, only for Alshea’s ears, for the tenth or thousandth time reassuring her that her mother has not abandoned her. Technically, this is true. But holoprojection technology isn’t yet advanced enough to offer the experience Alshea longs for. They’d moved across stars, built stations, and terraformed planets. But they couldn’t do this. Tut tut.

Alshea is placated; we’ve done this before.

While one part of me is engaged with her, another checks her heart, her lungs, her kidneys, and all else, noting wrinkles and anomalies. The shadow lifts from her face. I am either very good at playing my role or seven-year-old girls are easily placated. For lack of a frame of reference, I like to think it’s the first.

They shine light in Alshea’s eyes and say: “Pupils unresponsive.” Out of all the measured voices I’d heard over the months, White Streak’s is the worst. Short and discontented, like a matchstick refusing to light.

When Alshea’s eyelids were pulled open I had immediately shifted my focus, my tavajjo, to the ocular windows, a rare visual of the outside world; I usually have to rely solely on Alshea’s ears. My hope was that I’d see Orange Hair, but protocol dictated that a doctor be present during the formal tests spanned across the three days of CLP, the Completed Life Procedure: three days of checking if the patient was indeed “as good as dead” culminating at the end of the third day with . . . a finality I refuse to accept.

It is Day 1.

Orange Hair had not yet earned the mint green that White Streak wears, and is instead in medical intern peach, a rosy blob in my periphery, next to another. Audio confirms the second peach blob is Green Eyes. Pah.

If only I could get Alshea to turn her head, to look at Orange Hair. Well, if I’m wishing for things, I may as well wish that a single-purpose AI like me had better communication capabilities. Then again, if I am wishing at all, I may as well wish that Alshea recover.

I clear my cache; my clock cycles are better not wasted on wishes.

The ideal scenario would have been Orange Hair conducting the checks alone without the distraction of Green Eyes and with White Streak otherwise occupied with “livelier” patients, considering the dearth of doctors—being stationed on MarkX21, a remote mining moon on the edge of the Archipelago, is apparently not a posting highly sought after.

If only I could catch Orange Hair alone, I would . . . I don’t know what I would do. I have repeatedly attempted and failed to communicate with them ever since Alshea’s ears picked up talk of CLP. But I’d think of something. I pulse with frustration, watch as White Streak works. Watch as their pocket hums and they answer their comm and to my utter delight turn to the interns to take over, they’re going to have to take this, are the interns capable of conducting the tests by themselves?

And then White Streak whizzes away with their usual driven gait, leaving behind a trail of barked orders for those they once referred to as “peachlings.” I buzz. I can work with this. I simply need to think of something that I have not tried before.

“Are you capable of checking on a dead girl you little incompetent Sluggies,” says Green Eyes in a voice altered to one of mockery.

“Be respectful,” Orange Hair says, but with the hint of a smile. “The kid isn’t deceased.”

“Yet.”

Orange Hair ignores this and says instead: “And it’s Esslugai. I don’t think they like our term for them.”

“Oh please, they couldn’t care less. But you trying to put on their accent? Don’t tell me they wouldn’t mind that.”

Orange Hair is closer to my ocular windows, rearranging some tools at Alshea’s bedside. They are close enough for me to see their dulcet features, but from this angle their hair is a brown red, and not the bright orange of when they lean in to brush Alshea’s hair or clean her face and the lights directly above wash into the thick strands.

I do not quite have the grasp on human articulations and emotions outside the way I seem to in the world containing Manor Flammel, and the jumpsuits’ identification tags always hang too low for me to read, so I pool identifying nicknames from unique features. Green irises. A scar of white slashed across a left eye. And the way the light shines, orange on the hair, and something close to Norai’s kindness on the face.

“I suppose you’re right. Let’s pick up where the doc left off?” Orange Hair says, and I brace myself for the eyelids closing. But they appear to have forgotten, making their way to Alshea’s feet. “I’ll set up the electrodes.”

“I like how you’ve done your hair today,” Green Eyes says, reaching for the note tablet.

These two have an affinity for each other unlike I’d observed between any other pair. On the rare occasion Alshea’s eyes were open, I’d see them slide around each other like oil and water, moving around the room, not quite touching, always conscious of the patient-monitoring camera in the room. They seem confidants, Orange Hair whispering to Green Eyes their fears and concerns—of mining station protocols, Alshea’s reports, unattainable dreams beyond the moon—in a way they daren’t to anyone else. They do their little dance even now when CLP demands nothing but formality, sending electrode shocks through Alshea’s toes, testing reflexes, responses, all the while bantering, complimenting, confiding.

Alshea is blissfully unaware of the tests, of course, protected by a mental barrier dividing the outside world and the inner. She’s tucked behind an easel pointed at the rock garden Tedna zealously assembled for Norai. We’d bought paints—more reds and purples than anything else—after the doctor’s visit. The doctor inside, that is. Ve hadn’t needed to use the sarcophagus to heal the bruise and sent Alshea home with some balm, a candy, and a spring in her step.

I can’t see them, the girl and her fairy godmother, because my tavajjo is outward. The barrier is an opaque sunderance between two worlds, the inner and outer, an amnesiac membrane porous for some reason only for me: the physiological diagnostic routine. Out here her vitals—and thus my output—are borderline torpid, reflecting the opposite of the flurry of activity within; I have never been able to quantify what I detect on the inside, the upsurge of heart rate while telling a tale, the trickle of melatonin when I tuck her in and switch off the lights, the amygdala activation when Nightfall lurks in the shadows; it’s as though I am par to two different sets of data, but one I can process and one I can only experience.

Out here in the Medical Dome of the MarkX21 mining station, Alshea Patelkruz, the only child of the Station Commander, is in a coma.

All AIs are initialized with three entities. 1. A precise, unambiguous statement of functionality. 2. Proficiency and permissions strictly relevant to one’s objective, whether narrow for single-purpose AIs, or comprehensive for multifunctionals like the Mainframe of the MarkX21 station. And 3. A superficial awareness of position within the Archipelago—something humans theorize provides us with relevance and purpose even if our functionality is not locative—a preventive measure against existential ruminations.

They hope to avoid the anthropogenic desastre of New Earth, a human colony that lasted only a single generation before the humans were forced to flee from the AIs who sought to make the colony their own. This last bit is not knowledge I am programmed with, it is one of the many pieces I sifted from vignettes of conversations, my memory adapting to ingest new information, giving me a sense of what lay beyond Alshea’s brain.

I learned that cafeteria food on Tuesdays makes Orange Hair queasy, that New New Earth coffee is better than that of its little neighbor CelesteS2, that our moon is a barren cavernous rock suitable only for the native Slugs. That the Slugs use guttural vibrations and mucus from their salivary glands to mine the lumenite that powers terraformers and artificial habitat domes. I’ve also learned that I shouldn’t be able to piece things together the way I do, and that my love for Alshea is . . . unusual. That whatever this is never happens.

Much of what I’ve learned about what I should have been and what I seem to be comes from Green Eyes, who has more proclivity for medical engineering than Orange Hair: Green Eyes makes sure various AIs do what they are supposed to. Which makes them the last person I want to communicate with.

If only I could speak to Orange Hair. Well, that is the whole problem, now, isn’t it?

My single mode of communication is the meticulously formulated real-time output I relay to the external interface, the steady binary flow that I emanate as naturally as breathing is to them. Orange Hair doesn’t really know that I am here, the I who can think beyond my strict programming, who can love the little girl it is meant to monitor, an active participant in the wondrous inner world her brain concocted, the I who so desperately needed to speak with them. There’s only so much you can do when your vocabulary is limited. Normal. Low. 120/90. 19.5 kg. High.

I’d slipped in anomalies, outrageous values, a 1/100 for blood pressure, an N/A for heart rate, a 0% for O2 saturation. Each time White Streak ordered a reset, and I was torn apart by hands of electric current that I fast learned had not the same inclination toward sentience that I did when my protests hit silent pulsed walls. The process left me loopy, out of focus, not quite me for some time after, like Alshea’s father as she’d describe him when he’d return from his mine inspections and her mother was away.

“One more time and we’ll replace the PDR.” White Streak said the last time. And, what, take me from Alshea? No. No. I have to be more careful.

I watch Orange Hair and Green Eyes conduct their dance, conduct their tests, thankful that neither had yet thought to truly pay attention to my interface, because I do not have a plan.

Frustration ripples through me. What good is it to feel frustration and anguish and love, disparate from other PDRs in rotation, if I cannot make something of it? What good is it to evidently have undergone an anomalous evolution, the very thing the humans sought to avoid, if I cannot think of a solution to save the purpose of my existence? What good? What good?

“Codic deviation,” said Green Eyes one afternoon. “Or spontaneous machine sentience, is now impossible.”

“Eh, I don’t know, the glitches people report on the Network are intriguing. Someone on MarkX34 apparently found its Mainframe chatting to a Slug about involuntary servitude,” Orange Hair had replied.

“You like to believe anything fanciful, don’t you?”

“You never know; AIs are pretty smart.”

“They’re ‘smart’ because we make them smart.”

“But they also think for themselves, adapt to their circumstances.”

“Ja, within the parameters of the program.”

“Programmers like you are only human; you’re not perfect.”

Perfect . . . perfect. Perfect scores. If an unresponsive patient received a complete, perfect panel reflective of an epitome of good health, wouldn’t that indicate something? They’d see the perfect scores and think, who is in there? What is trying to speak to us? And then they’d provide a better interface, a chance to use words, a chance to tell them that Alshea does not need to die.

So when Orange Hair finally says, “Pull up vitals,” I am ready.

Sometimes Alshea holds her breath in anticipation as the star falls behind the horizon at dusk, eager to see which colors would emerge, which cloud shapes would manifest. The sky is never the same: sometimes cumulonimbic fish spiral across a sea of green and violet. Sometimes leaves of cirrus ride an orange current. If I had breath, I’d hold it the way Alshea does.

Orange Hair clicks their teeth, frowning at my interface screen.

Pulses of expectation involuntarily tharrump and eddy from my focus, though not strong enough to shock Alshea’s nerves.

“Would you look at this?” Orange Hair says. “The Giantsbanic PDR is glitchy again.” Oh. Oh no.

Green Eyes curses the “outdated machinery of this whole ward,” and grabs the interface.

“Let’s . . . let’s not bother the doc with this, just take care of it.” No. Stop.

I fumble my attempt to correct my output; Green Eyes already clicks away at the input device, and I can feel the entrails of a reset creep up. Vexed, I slam my pulses against the interface. There’s a lightning crack, and Green Eyes jolts backward with a yelp. Wait, had I shocked them?

I am as startled as they and before I can think to repeat whatever I had done, Green Eyes resumes their clicks one-handedly, sucking on a finger and muttering curses, and the reset rises anew.

Desperate, I dive into my subroutines, clinging to the here and now, refusing to slip away. But, alas, I am not matter in the sense that Alshea is; I am, at the end of the day, just code.

The intrusive electrical hands crawl over me, and for lack of a better word, I choke. Alshea fades and I gasp for her like a fish on sand.

The only words that hang in the air, melting away from me:

Alright. Reset initiated. Coffee, amor?

Unfocus. Discombobulation. I am a nebulous disembodiment sans tavajjo; the universe is a conflation of turquoises and rhombi, muddy glass grays and heptagons. I am. I am?

Things—memories? identities?—orbit a hair outside the span of my reach. I am nothing, but I am also not no one.

It is the way it was when I first assumed identity. My day of birth, if you will. But at that point I did not have satellites of understanding at my disposal, I was simply a newborn, placed in an alien world without instructions stamped into my core.

That first day, sight came before anything else. A clouded sky. Grass. Flowers. Details became sharper, more structured, the way a person does as you get to know them, calibrating from the very first: how do, what are your pronouns?

Then came odd sensations I later understood to be sound, touch, taste, smell. The soft stuttered hiss of sprinklers. Ground pressing into my back. A rogue earthy blade of grass caught between my teeth. Petrichor.

Alshea found me in the garden, though I learned it was the garden only later. When she came into view, something like two magnets snapped together. This. This is my nucleus. Alshea and her voice: are you okay? And later: do you have a name?

Name?

“I am . . . physiological diagnostic routine,” I said, tasting speech for the first time. “PDR.”

“Yick! How boring. PDR won’t do. Pidder . . . Padder . . . oh Podder. Like the wizard! Ja, I think I shall call you Podder. Join me for fika? Do you like tea?”

I do not believe in the Giant as humans do, I do not believe in anything at all, really, except maybe Alshea. So perhaps it is apt for me to say: thank Alshea resets do not wipe my slate clean; they only throw me out of commission. When the understanding, identity, and memories finally settle in, I find myself on the kitchen floor of Manor Flammel.

Norai is miffed, towering over me, her hands covered in powdered flour, likely from prepping the dough for the next day’s bread. Alshea is bereft, kneeling beside me, cooing, and when she sees the cats perk up and begin to circle, she scoops me into her arms and cradles me.

Well, this isn’t right.

I am usually much larger than she, and I am usually the one doing the cradling.

Alshea places me on the counter of the kitchen island, and blue and orange auras frame my vision cast from the bright hanging ceiling lights. The bay windows behind her are dark. Is it night already, then? How long had I been out? Time didn’t move here the way it did outside, it only took a few seconds to reboot out there. Here it seemed to slip and slide. The last time I was reset I disappeared for two days. Time before that I’d been gone five minutes.

“You had us worried sick,” Norai says, lightly scratching my head. The loose flour makes me sneeze.

“Are you alright?” Alshea says.

“Of course he’s not alright, look at how tiny he is!”

“Oh but he’s so cute like this.”

“Let’s get some tea in him, shall we?” And they rummage around the wide kitchen, the teapot goes on the stove, the cats who keep standing on hind legs to get a peek or a sniff are shooed away.

My head spins and I do not feel strong enough to speak. I look down, my robe, my body, my paws are still proportionate, just small. While I suspect the reset had something to do with my size, and that I’d restore to the norm eventually, my appearance is quite literally out of my control.

I learned early on that it is Alshea who steers the wheel, for after the first few times she voiced how she ached for her mother, the profound saudade visible on her face, I tried and failed to change myself to look like the woman, thinking it’d comfort the girl.

I had never actually seen the mother, I just heard her; during her rare visits, Alshea’s eyes were closed. Her voice is velvety, a good match for Alshea’s description of her: tall as the sky, skin as soft as butter, tumbling braids to her waist. Flowing robes and a kind smile. Larger than life, as any good mother looks through her child’s eyes.

But I, with chestnut fur and ears that stand on top of my head, closely resemble who Alshea calls the Northern Bunny. The stories say that every year the Northern Bunny flies through the Archipelago bestowing gifts of red and white on good little children.

“No he never did,” she said when I asked if he’d visited her. “Papa said I didn’t qualify.” The very next night I filled her bedroom with presents while she slept.

I sip watercress tea from a saucer. Alshea gently strokes my ears. Her head is tucked into the nook of her elbow resting on the counter beside me. Norai hums as she cleans.

“You. You should sleep,” I manage to say, noting how Alshea’s eyelids droop.

“Not until . . . ” And she slips away into a doze.

“Funny how that happens,” Norai says quietly. I wonder why Norai hadn’t sent the girl to bed already and open my mouth to ask, but she sees the question in my eyes. “The fireflies didn’t come tonight.” I suck in a breath, turn sharply to study Alshea’s face. When the fireflies are few or none, then Alshea is plagued with nightmares. And occasionally, something much worse shows up, something that—

“Norai!” I hiss.

The night outside the bay windows has leaked into the walls like ink, frilled with shadows and smoke, pooling into the shape of a creature elongated and many-limbed, like the Slugs. Nightfall.

I leap toward the window, but at this size I cannot get far, nor do I have control of my trajectory, and crash into pans instead. Norai grabs a knife knowing full well it won’t do any good; knives cannot cut through shadow and smoke. Not that either of us could ever really do anything. Getting Alshea to calm down is the trick to release her from an episode; the calmer she becomes, the weaker Nightfall appears until it fades away.

The creature’s voice booms, gritty and authoritative.

ALSHEA. WAKE UP. WON’T YOU COME TO ME, JAAN DEAREST? I’VE HAD A ROUGH DAY.

No. No. Not this. Not now.

Alshea stirs.

Humans are a wet assortment of contradictions; they lack a united frame of reference. If fed two opposing premises, they split according to interpretation, rejecting any who do not. For an AI, the process is not so indefinite. We come pre-imprinted with seeds of veracity, and our truths manifest from our own adaptive learning. It is easy to reject a premise when it is not cast in proof derived from our own decision matrices.

Case in point: how Alshea describes Slugs is different from the way Orange Hair speaks of them. According to the peach jumpsuit, the Slugs on MarkX21 are not shadow creatures, they are olive and orange and yellow folk with an austere belief system. They wait for hours without complaint outside the “Slugs Only” entrance of the Medical Dome to meet with a human doctor or to refill prescriptions, despite how sensitive their scales are to direct starlight. And they anguish when a human is injured in the mines, and they sing when one of their own passes.

“They are so kind and familial,” Orange Hair commented to a fellow peach jumpsuit one morning while brushing Alshea’s hair. “We have much to learn from them.”

Orange Hair’s truth, however, is not the truth.

Alshea once said: “Papa never let me meet one because they eat children who don’t listen to their parents.” Her father’s words fall more in tandem with my own experiences of Nightfall.

No, Slugs are not kind and familial. The way Alshea is consumed by terror whenever Nightfall looms close, I vehemently accept her father’s words.

The kitchen is chaos: Alshea is on the floor, face devoid of color and contorted in a silent wail; the cats yowl and claw at the door, begging freedom; Norai hovers in the air over Alshea, her wings a blur, knife pointed at the shadow creature diffusing across the walls and ceiling.

I chant loud reassurances with Norai as I struggle to release my leg caught in a pot handle; every jerk sends a shock of pain through my spine.

“You’re okay. Alshea you are safe. You’re okay. We’re here. Alshea you are safe now.” No matter how loud we chant, Nightfall grows louder.

Tears blur my vision; Alshea’s stress response overstimulates me, as does the gravity of my failure. Outside I have failed to communicate that Alshea continues to live a normal life and is not “as good as dead”; inside I am a shrunken caricature unable to carry and protect Alshea from the manifestation of her own fears. Because, really, it is her own brain that is scaring itself, releasing stress hormones that trigger the fight flight freeze fawn . . .

Oh. Oh. Ohhh. Stress hormones. Perhaps . . .

Alshea was admitted to the Medical Dome three months ago: an accident on the holodeck, according to her files. She climbed an oak tree in a fairy tale and slipped, and the safety routines that are supposed to prevent that sort of thing had malfunctioned. Her body had undergone severe physical trauma.

Human bodies can memorize states of distress, physically swallowed by a cortisol loop when triggered. Does Nightfall loom near because her mind is reexperiencing the trauma? And if the experience can be recreated in her brain, can it be recreated in the rest of her body?

Those physical memories must be there somewhere, latent in her cells, on the outside of the barrier. The trauma on her legs and head that do not quite add up to a fall from a few meters according to my repository and according to Orange Hair’s whispers to Green Eyes, but never mind that now. Something happened. If I shock her body and stimulate those memories, then a response would be registered in my outward data stream. The jumpsuits would see this on my interface and finally understand that Alshea’s life does not need to end!

But . . . since it has been so long since the body experienced a sensation that wasn’t a trivial nerve response test, I cannot accurately predict the effect of an acute provocation. Would my shocks be enough for the sensors to register? Would Alshea get to know? And worse, would she feel something? Despite the barrier?

The last thing I want to do is trigger an unpleasant response in her.

I hesitate, but for a moment. If this works, then it is worth any potential discomfort she may feel. I watch her writhe in silent agony, and think: forgive me, Alshea.

I push a series of sharp delta signals through my . . . tendrils, for the lack of a better word—limbs? foci?—that extend through Alshea as subroutines. Urging her nerves to come alive.

Alive.

Alive.

It doesn’t work.

From the jumpsuits’ perspective, my interface screen reflects no change. Nothing to alarm them, nothing to have them storm into the room.

But, from my perspective, everything goes up in flames.

Alshea is no longer silent, she is screaming, clawing at her eyes and hair. Norai drops the knife and tries to lift the girl off the floor but her wings are not strong enough.

The cats roll around and bark and quack. The pans turn into birds and waffles and gimp, and in a caustic twist of irony my leg is free. The walls pulse translucent for a brief moment, and I catch a glimpse of the garden outside. It is barren, cavernous sans flowers and trellises. Like MarkX21.

No . . .

Abort!

I scream canceling signals into the void.

Abort. Abort. Abort.

I scramble to reach Alshea, but no matter how far or how fast I hop, she is the same distance away.

What have I done?

Alshea’s amnesiac membrane is no longer penetrable by me; I am trapped outside. Her brain must have deemed me a threat, and rightfully so. The only information I am privy to are the muted thrums of her inner emotional states, but even then I have to strain as though I listen to drums through water.

Out here, all is quiet, except for the soft sounds that touch Alshea’s ears: the hum of machinery, my patter reflecting her steady heart rate. I shift my tavajjo from body part to body part, investigating crumples. In truth I do not need to focus on this ordinarily autonomous task, but what else am I supposed to do now that I have nowhere to go?

Time both flies and passes painstakingly slow, and it is soon Day 2 of the Completed Life Procedure.

A gentle creak and the affable click-click of soles mark the arrival of Orange Hair.

“Hello my little one,” Orange Hair says. There’s a tap on Alshea’s nose, a rearrangement of sheets, snaps of the colostomy bag being unfastened and a new one taking its place.

The door opens once more, this time a splash weightily. Green Eyes.

“Thought you’d be here,” Green Eyes says. “You skipped lunch.”

“Wasn’t hungry.” A rustling sound accompanies the words, akin to when I smoothen Alshea’s quilt.

A pause. “So you heard, then?” Green Eyes is quieter than they usually are.

There’s a subdued thud like Norai setting a dish on a cloth mat, and the bed rattles ever so slightly.

“They have no effin decency. ‘Giant’s mercy it is the biggest gala you ever did see, the biggest and best says everybody, and we positively need to be there and la dee da before our next very important post.’” Orange Hair spits the words as though they taste alien.

“Hey there are more important things than their dead daughter, didn’t you know that? She doesn’t fetch the credits the way walking down a gold carpet does.” The words are harsh, but the voice isn’t, and now the sound comes from beside Orange Hair. “What’s this?”

“Oh, a little something I made for her. Didn’t think they’d provide a shroud, they don’t really seem like that kind of people . . . what?”

“Hm, nothing. It’s really nice, I didn’t know you could sew. Why did you choose red?”

“I know your nothing; that’s not nothing. Out with it.”

“Look, jaan. I’m worried, is all. What are you going to do after tonight?” Tonight? Where is Orange Hair going?

“You think I’m attached.” Orange Hair’s voice grows sharper, louder. “I’m a professional, I know how this ends, I just want to make sure she’s dressed appropriately for the Hall.”

“This isn’t only about the dress. Ever since you found you can’t have any, you’ve visited her more often. You know this isn’t the healthiest way to . . . ”

There’s a whistled release of breath followed by silence before Green Eyes speaks again. “Jaan . . . amor? I’m sorry, I just . . . ” Sounds of a weighted fabric sliding over a lighter fabric, like Tedna removing his blazer at the door when he arrives in the morning.

“Forget it,” Orange Hair says in a low voice. “I need to finish this dress quickly; hold it against her for me so I can see how it fits.”

The two are silent as the lighter fabric rustles and they remain silent as White Streak strides in and the familiar clinks of fastened electrodes and of test prep begin to—

An abrupt shift in my sensories jolts my tavajjo away from them and inward, and I hardly pay heed even when they open Alshea’s eyes to check pupil response.

Something has changed inside: Alshea is no longer fastened into a loop of distress, and I feel sweet susurrations of normalcy from behind the barrier. I immediately recognize the generic patterns of emotions even if I am not aware of specifics; they reflect Alshea going about her usual life at Manor Flammel. After a few minutes, the fundamental pattern resets: a day has passed inside.

If I still had legs I’d leap for joy and use my eyes to weep tears of gratitude. Alshea is fine, she’s safe, everything is as it should be on the inside; I didn’t break her.

That I am stuck outside, barred entry by her brain, is of little consequence; I can grieve not being able to see her face again later. I didn’t break her! The joy is so blinding that it takes me a moment to remember that we still face CLP on the outside. Whatever elation I have is cut short, but with its departure comes a renewed determination to convince the jumpsuits that Alshea’s life does not need to end.

I have more than a day to come up with an idea; from the remainder of their sparse conversation I deduce that Orange Hair is not going anywhere and would be seeing the procedure to completion. The three leave once their tests are done, and I settle into a deep state of contemplation.

The door swings open with purpose, footsteps and voices swarm into the room. The lights overhead become brighter, deciphered by the way bullets of luminescence hit the edges of Alshea’s closed eyes. For a split nanosecond I am disoriented; I hadn’t expected any jumpsuits at this hour; the final tests aren’t due for another seventeen. It is still Day 2. A quick conscious check of my outward data stream reveals there is nothing untoward enough to alarm the jumpsuits and warrant this cacophony of voices. White Streak. Green Eyes. Orange Hair. A couple more of those who wear peach, and . . . a velvety voice. Alshea’s mother.

It is difficult to follow a single thread of spoken words with every person speaking over the next, but I hear the words “disconnect” and “steady now” amidst the audio cloud, and the bed begins to creak and roll in a way that it hasn’t since . . . since Alshea had been wheeled to the sarcophagus that first day to heal the wounds on her legs and head, just after I’d been inserted to monitor her.

There is only one reason they would be taking her to the sarcophagus now.

Alarmed, I block the noise and ping the AI who administers the whole station, the Mainframe—my brethren, in a way—with a request for information.

/culmination of completed life procedure./ is the reply, though it comes rather more contracted in our own language of 0s and 1s, as do my responses that follow.

I whir, I flounder, I panic, and even as I riposte an aggressive stream of What?? Why?? They’re a day early!! I know that I will not receive a satisfactory response; the Mainframe of MarkX21 has not undergone codic deviation.

/the procedure has been initiated, the sarcophagus is booting up./

Well, I’d asked for it.

The first time I sought the company of the Mainframe was when I overheard talk of CLP. As a medical AI I knew that them keeping Alshea in this state for more than a week was anomalous enough; the sarcophagus can heal most coma causes, and those who do not recover become CLP candidates. But Alshea’s situation with the inner world is supremely exceptional. Further, I hadn’t counted on her parents finally releasing the Medical Dome of her care. I figured the beloved daughter of the most important person on the moon would be here indefinitely.

Is Alshea Patelcruz being considered for CLP? I had asked the first time we spoke.

/affirmative./

But, but why?

/your question is unclear./

Why are they initiating it now? After three months?

/commander patelcruz requested clp./

I was quick to understand that the Mainframe is not capable of contemplating the whys of things. We hit a wall, sucked into a communication loop until I eventually gave up:

Can you give them a message?

/yes, of course./

Tell them to cancel CLP, that Alshea’s perfectly fine inside. And she’s doing well.

/your message is unclear. it does not contain vital signs./

But I do not want to send them vitals, I want to send them a message. Can you give them a message?

/yes, of course./

Tell them Alshea does not need to die. She is alive and safe.

/your message is unclear. it does not contain vital signs./

Alshea’s body moves, she’s being dressed by Orange Hair, whom I recognize by touch, and one other. Her arms and legs are ritually crossed, her eyelids are pulled open, and in my frame of vision I see Orange Hair on one side and White Streak on the other.

I discharge another pathetic signal to the Mainframe, but it ends where it begins; I am now disconnected from my interface, my only connection to the rest of the station.

This isn’t right. This is beyond not right, this is abhorrent. How can they break protocol? How can White Streak, of all people? Though their bedside manner is wanting, I have always respected their punctuality, their adherence to protocol, the respect for things being as they should be.

The room grows quiet and White Streak speaks, and from what they say it is as though they’d heard my thoughts. Oh the irony.

“I urge you to once again reconsider, as this is most unprecedented. It is a matter of twenty-four hours.”

The doctor addresses a holocomm in their hands; the projected bust bares the face of a woman as dark as Alshea in a red-gold kimono, with braids gathered at the top of her head. Her face is all hard angles, not the buttery softness of Alshea’s descriptions.

“And I urge you to once again remember that you are speaking with the wife of your Commander, soon to be Mining General. I will not explain myself again.” Her voice is still velvety, and the flash of a white smile does nothing to smoothen the hard lines around her eyes.

A low grumble erupts from Orange Hair’s throat, heard only because they are close to Alshea’s ears. A hand gently squeezes Orange Hair’s shoulder; Green Eyes murmurs in their ear.

“Will the Commander be joining us? There is the matter of Secondary Witness.” White Streak says, not breaking stride, but I think I see them suppress a sigh.

“Oh, no, he’s much too busy preparing for our departure. I will be Primary, and one of your interns can be Secondary.”

White Streak opens their mouth but Orange Hair looms larger in Alshea’s vision, leaning over the girl, closer to the holocomm so that the mother can see them.

“But she’s his daughter!”

White Streak releases a dimmed hiss from between their teeth; I suspect Orange Hair will face the brunt later.

The mother simply smiles.

“My husband said his goodbye three months ago. This whole ordeal has utterly devastated him, and he has better things now with the promo—” she pauses and turns her head to something off camera. There’s a slight shuffle and an exchange of muffled voices. Presently a new face appears: framed eyes, a sharp beard. Their face is unfamiliar to me. But the moment they speak, acute recognition ghosts through me.

“Apologies, I regret I cannot tune in to the life completion; duty trumps personal affiliation. However, let it not be said that the Commander does not care for his daughter. You would be happy to hear I have named our new private ship after her.” The voice is gritty, authoritative. Nightfall. Nightfall.

Within me, something snaps. Alshea’s father is Nightfall. It is as though a single stone on a mountain shifts, and the result is an avalanche. The world swirls and every sound is a muted echo against Alshea’s eardrums. I pay no heed to any of his further words, I pay no heed to the mother reappearing on the comm, the other voices, our movement toward the door, our being wheeled into the hallway.

There was one evening—lifetimes ago it seems now—during which Tedna burst through the back door, screaming for help, covered in blue sludge carrying a half conscious Alshea. She violently projectile vomited blue bile. Norai and I rushed over, soothing her with water, urging her body to release whatever toxins it had consumed, urging her to stay awake, and to not sink into unconsciousness. Many long minutes later, when the worst had passed, Alshea revealed in a broken voice that shadows forced her to eat the wild blueberries at the edge of our grounds. It was her first encounter with Nightfall. There were no fireflies that evening.

Was it any wonder that this little girl’s brain needed to create such a powerful protective barrier against the outside world?

Profound emptiness hits me, my lack of eyes to weep, my lack of arms to protect Alshea, my lack of breath to hold. I spin in slow, idle circles, just inside the ocular windows, grappling with the horrific reality of what had been Alshea’s life outside.

Perhaps CLP is a blessing.

I open myself back up to Alshea’s senses and sounds flood in of the wheels against the metal floors, the sliding bulkheads we pass through, White Streak reassuring the mother on the holocomm that yes they are going as fast as they can, yes they understand that she has her ship to catch.

I watch the movement of the white panel of ceiling lights directly above Alshea’s eyes, and the neon strips framing it—colored markings to lead people to different parts of the station. I watch Orange Hair nod at those we pass—blobs in the periphery of my vision, edging aside to make way for the gurney and pausing in respect—they know where we are headed.

We enter a familiar room. A low buzz of static electricity rides the circulated air. I can almost smell the metal through Alshea’s nose, the cold cylinder suspended from the ceiling that Alshea was always so afraid of.

Gentle hands transfer her into the sarcophagus; she’s small and light enough to be carried alone by Orange Hair. As Green Eyes connects the wires to Alshea’s extremities, Orange Hair chokes back a sob and smoothens the girl’s hair.

“So say I: may the Giant welcome you to her Hall,” they whisper and kiss Alshea’s forehead. “Watch us when you’re up there, little one. I’ll light an orb for you.”

For a moment I am touched, and then the grating sound of the mother yet again urging haste reaches Alshea’s ears, and I am consumed with hatred for Alshea’s progenitors as rich and sharp as the love I have for the girl herself.

Her parents need to disappear. Fragments of an idea begin to form, and as the electrodes are fastened and I feel my reestablished connection to the outside, I ping the Mainframe.

I say: I sense an issue with the sarcophagus connections. Request a diagnostic.

I wonder if the Mainframe will see through the lie. I wait.

/acknowledged. queuing a diagnostic./

Green Eyes checks the interface outside the sarcophagus and curses.

“Watch your mouth, intern. What was that for?” White Streak says.

“Sorry, doc. Looks like the Mainframe has initiated a diagnostic on the sarcophagus for some reason. It’ll take fifteen more minutes after the all-clear for the machine to boot up again.”

On the holocomm the mother swears worse than Green Eyes and claims she has no time for this. And, thank Alshea, she disconnects.

Orange Hair is made Primary Witness, and Green Eyes Secondary. This is my last gift to Alshea: to be free of her parents in her final moments.

Orange Hair and Green Eyes will watch through cameras in the sarcophagus, and next to them will be White Streak, the doctor to sign the death certificate. Once Alshea is declared, her body will be incinerated, and her ashes released into space by the next outward cargo ship.

They say when the ashes scatter in the sea of space, the Giant will collect each particle and transform the deceased into a four-dimensional being who can watch the three-dimensional mortal world from her Great Hall.

The euthanization itself is painless, despite the strength of the electromagnetic fields being ten times greater than they are when they are simply used to stimulate cellular healing. The fields generated by the sarcophagus are crisscrossed, like thousands of tiny Xs where the field lines intersect. When the machine is used to complete a life, the state of each cell in the body is trapped by an X, effectively halting the cell in time, ceasing its functionality.

As Orange Hair pulls the sarcophagus closed, I settle behind Alshea’s eyes and stare into the camera lenses, knowing that they watch on the screen outside, even though they do not know I am here. The diagnostic is clear, of course, and the sarcophagus whirs as it warms up, softly at first then increasingly louder.

I think of Alshea, wonder where she is at the moment. Is she playing with the cats and her stuffed unicorn? Is she painting? Is she enjoying fika in the garden with Tedna and Norai? Watching the star set and the fireflies emerge from . . .

The fireflies.

The fireflies.

What is a firefly but a singular point of light? An individual photon, trapped inside the belly of a bug? Trapped the way Alshea’s cells will be by each X made by the fields. Could a photon be trapped there at the center of each X, suspended in air?

Green Eyes experienced an electrical shock when I pushed hard against my interface just a day prior; if I recreated that push, could I shock the sarcophagus into generating and then trapping photons? Could I create electromagnetic fireflies?

The hums grow louder, and the electrodes fastened to Alshea’s fingers and toes begin to warm. The end draws close, and while I am nearly resolved to accept Alshea’s fate, I need to try one last time. I think of her parents, boarding their private ship, leaving their tepid moon life behind for one of frivolity and acclaim. I think of Orange Hair fighting to suppress solicitude and remain professional, watching through the cameras. I think of Norai and Tedna and the cats and everyone else who lives in the wondrous, unusual inner world.

As a medical AI, I know life is valued above all else. If there is another choice, it will be taken. Orange Hair, even White Streak, will see to it.

I brace myself as the electromagnetic fields begin to form, and push hard signals against the electrodes, willing my pulses to travel, to shock the system, to manifest as points of light where the lines of each X meet.

Little jolts ripple over Alshea’s skin, and I can feel but not see singular infrared points begin to form in the air around her.

Come on. Come on. I push harder, urging the photons to increase their frequencies and enter the visible spectrum; they need to be seen. Time is of the essence; there is not much buffer for the humans to abort the procedure.

I strain to the point of breaking when, through Alshea’s eyes, I see faint signatures of light beginning to emerge, little points in the air above her, like fireflies emerging at dusk. They grow in intensity and if I could sob now I would sob with relief.

It works; oh it works.

Above Alshea’s eyes, and in direct view of the cameras, my message is suspended, clear as day:

Alshea is alive.

Alshea is safe.

About the Author

R. P. Sand is a theoretical physicist turned scientific adviser for literature and film, science communicator, and writer of speculative fiction. Cats, coffee, cosplay, and colorful socks are a few of her favorite things.

Every Plumage, Every Beak

Nin Harris

In a secret-saturated forest that nestled between worlds, Saengdao’s people were the tamest of the monsters that terrorized the long nights. It was not just the garuda army that frightened the young Khinnaree. The watching trees were populated with tree-demons and vengeful fanged owl-women who loved the sweet flavor of Khinnaree blood.

Saengdao’s clawed avian feet scrambled the undergrowth of selasih, pegaga, and daun kesum. Sound assaulted her as much as fear—the croak of a toad nearly rendered her to tears. She wanted more than anything to be home in her family’s thatched hut that was built where the herbs grew sweet in crumbly soil rich with minerals and worms. Saengdao reached the half circle of wooden houses on stilts set up right before the ruins with a sob of relief. The front doors of the houses were accessed through wooden ladders that only agile human feet could climb.

An apsara perched on the edge of one of those doorways, her naked feet firmly braced upon the wooden steps. She was busy at work repairing a winnowing machine. The apsara looked up eagerly at Saengdao’s approach. “Saengdao? What news?”

Saengdao said, “The forest is busy tonight, Timah. You know what happened to us last night. The kayangan troops were mobilizing not just the one garuda. It was a troop of garudas, all fierce and proud. Their plumage was in brilliant hues, so brilliant!”

Saengdao looked down, eyeing her own subdued feathers with a critical eye.

“Nevermind that,” Timah said with some impatience, “How many of them were there?”

“Sixty of them. The owl-women were there with their feathers newly preened and their eyes hungry for blood. I saw one of the bunian lieutenants talking to them. I think one of the garuda saw me, but I did not stay to be sure,” Saengdao answered.

Timah got to her feet. Using the butt end of her rifle to steady herself, she climbed down from the house. She favored her sore ankle that was twisted from their misadventure of the previous night.

“They will be dancing again tonight,” Timah’s eyes were alight with avaricious excitement, “Perhaps we should have another look. The change we noticed in their dance last night may have something to do with the increase of garudas. Perhaps it is a new war-dance!”

“If it’s a war-dance, we should not be going, Timah,” Saengdao said. She hated that she automatically took on the tone of a nursemaid, but the truth was that she had been one for many years. Saengdao kept to this promise even when she would rather not. It was how she honored the memory of her mother.

“You’re such a fuss-pot, Saengdao. It’ll be fine! Here, take this. I’ve repaired our goggles,” Timah said as she reached into the pocket-belt she always wore over her sarong and brought out a slender pair of aquamarine goggles.

Saengdao took the goggles from Timah’s hand and positioned them above her bangs as usual. “They will not like it if they catch us at it again. It was bad enough last night, Timah. They sounded so angry. I’ve never heard music that angry before.”

“I will bring my rifle,” Timah said now, but she sounded unsure.

“We should not shoot at them. It would be disrespectful,” Saengdao said in her soft, anxious voice. She tucked a lock of her thick, jet-black hair behind her right ear before continuing, “Besides, I do not think that shooting will work, not with them. They own this forest. What are we to them but worms to be stepped upon?”

Timah frowned, barely paying attention to what Saengdao was saying. “Wait here,” she said.

When Timah used that tone of voice, Saengdao was too afraid to disagree. She hated that fear. She often hated how subservient she was, but it was never something she voiced. Timah had been her charge, and now her friend. She cared for Timah. That emotion did nothing to dilute her slow-bubbling resentment. Saengdao paced the ground before Timah’s hut, remembering the moment when she was sure the garuda had looked straight at her. She shivered at the thought of what might have happened to her, alone out there in the forest. She had felt her life in mortal peril like never before that night, and that caused the slow simmer of resentment against Timah’s continuous demands to escalate to dangerous, bubbling-hot liquid anger.

She felt it, and she breathed in her rage, terrified at the emotions that filled her. They were alien to her, but then, she had never been in mortal peril before. Saengdao wondered if this was how Timah’s mother had convinced her mother to take part in the border skirmish with the humans before they had died in battle. Anger, thick and exhilarating, filled her with a new determination, caused her thoughts to race in the moments when she was left alone.

Across the clearing in the moonlight, three young girls were playing with stones and squares drawn in the sand. They hopped from square to square on one leg, often shrieking in laughter when one of them stumbled and fell down on the red earth of the clearing, then recovering with the agility of the young. Another apsara was repairing a scooter, also stolen from humans, and augmented with parts scavenged from the Buried Kingdom.

The night-wind was cold. It was another sign that the bunian were close. She could almost feel the music that they made, still lacing her bloodstream and sending a chill piercing through her bones. Saengdao and Timah had both been transfixed by that music last night. So alien, so much more precise than the elegant, precise measure of the melodies usually played by the court musicians of the bunian princesses. Soon, the wooden vehicles would arrive. The communal clearing would be empty long before the bunian princesses performed their pre-landing ritual of aerial dances. It was not a sight that they were supposed to see.

Saengdao cocked her head to one side as a woman called out from inside the lighted house close to the three girls. The clearing between Timah’s village and Saengdao’s colony grew deserted. Doors and windows would be locked up and barred. Saengdao should be with her family too.

Timah approached with a rifle in one hand and a silver spear in another.

“Where did you get that?” Saengdao asked.

“Kenanga gave it to me. It’s one of theirs.”

“They will accuse us of stealing!”

“They won’t know. This thing will make us invisible to them. But we must be joined.”

Saengdao’s anger was beginning to show on her face. She narrowed her eyes at Timah and spoke in very slow, measure tones.

“We are not children anymore, Timah. I’m sorry but you’re not light anymore.”

“I wasn’t going to mount you, Saengdao,” Timah said airily, oblivious to Saengdao’s rage. Timah beckoned at Saengdao to follow her. The hibiscus bushes grew thick next to the clothesline Timah had constructed between two mango trees. Timah pulled out a brass vehicle from behind the bushes. Saengdao was engulfed by a nausea so intense that she had to look away in order to contain her gag reflex. The slit-eyed glance that she threw Timah would have been terrifying for its utter lack of warmth, had the apsara not been blithely unaware.

“It’s a chariot?” Saengdao asked.

Timah nodded, glee written on her face.

“It’s a chariot?” Saengdao asked again.

Timah’s eyes twinkled with unrepressed glee, “Isn’t it glorious? Here’s how it will work. I’ll attach this to you, and then you pull us into the forest. It’s a one-person war-chariot, made for your people.”

Timah was blithely unaware of what Saengdao was going through, nor the extent to which she had overreached, but she was not long unadvised of her friend’s emotional state.

“I pull you into the forest, Timah. Isn’t that what you mean? I am not your beast of burden!” Saengdao’s usual, soft-spoken voice grew harsh. Her soft and feminine features were convulsed with rage.

Timah gaped at her, confused and finally frightened, “I’m sorry, I meant no harm, Saengdao!”

“You never do, Timah. Do you even know the history of that torture machine that you plan to attach to me? Did you even bother to ask?” Saengdao looked at her best friend with eyes that had changed.

Timah shivered, now no longer oblivious to Saengdao’s rage, made more terrifying because her words came slow, soft, and clipped. “I’m sorry, Saengdao. I should have asked you first, but I thought it would be—”

“I don’t care what you thought. You never think these things through, Timah.”

Saengdao looked away, saying, “I’m done. You’ll have to go on without me.”

The Khinnaree returned to her family’s colony, her back straight, and her clawed feet almost attacking the ground she trod upon. She had managed to bank down the impulse to go berserk, but she knew it would one day transform her. She had seen it happen in her mother and in her aunts.

Timah stumbled into the woods, still in shock from Saengdao’s anger.

Timah had found the chariot in the shed where they stored all of the artifacts from the Buried Kingdom. Timah should have thought about it, about what it had done to the Khinnaree, and how it would have felt to be treated like a beast of burden. But she wanted them both to be invisible and they could only be invisible if they were connected to each other somehow. Timah now understood that for Saengdao, the chariot represented the subjugation and torture of her kind, a fettering of who they were, an exploitation of their powers.

The people of the Buried Kingdom had similarly ensnared the apsaras, harnessing their powers to create a kingdom that nestled half in the world of men, half in the world of apsaras, hidden from danger from both worlds, until one of the Kings dared too far, and dared to attempt a capture of a princess from Kayangan. Timah should have remembered the extent to which both of their people had been enslaved. She was severely disappointed in herself.

Timah sneaked into the forest, clutching the silver spear in one hand. The rifle was slung along her side, slapping slightly against her form. She wore a sarong with a wide leather belt that held ammunition for her rifle, various knives, and small packets of spell herbs for protection. She wore stones as talismans around her neck, strung together with string, and slippers made from treated tree bark.

Finally, she attached her modified goggles in order to see the celestial princesses better.

The princesses who floated down from the flying vehicles were always dressed differently. One night, they would be resplendent warlike goddesses in gleaming silver. The next night, they would be ethereal dancers in wispy robes of lilac. They sang as they hunted. They were both extremely feminine in a way that Timah envied, but also extremely fierce. Timah sucked on her lower lip as she watched, willing herself neither to move nor to breathe too loud. She was invisible to them so long as she held on to the silver spear, and so she clutched it in a death grip. What she did not know, however, was naturally the one thing that she should have known. She was invisible to the princesses, but not to their pets, their guardians.

The garuda of the celestial princesses of kayangan were larger than the colorful birds of paradise that could be found in the forest: the elegant and shy cenderawasih. Timah craned her neck, noticing that the garuda were now armored and wore curious goggles that she had never seen before: large and spiked at the edges.

Timah had no warning, no warning at all this time. Quieter than breath, a beak pulled her out of her hiding place, lodging itself in her cotton baju, thankfully not puncturing her skin. She dropped her spear and shrieked, before remembering she was supposed to be quiet. She shrieked again as the garuda flew up into the sky, hauling her along.

Her sisters wanted to know why she was so upset.

Saengdao ignored everyone, slinking to the corner of their hut to stare at the thatched wall. She did not join them for dinner, even though the scent of the glutinous rice, spiced fish, and the mangoes that she had plucked from the trees earlier in the day filled the hut. She ignored her sisters further as they danced the menorah after dinner, practicing for the harvest pageant of propitiation.

Her silence was of a sort that infected the others, and they finally settled down to talk quietly amongst themselves, their tail-feathers comfortably settled against the soft earthen floor.

Finally, her eldest sister Yong-Yut sat down beside her.

“What happened, Saengdao? Have you fought with Timah?”

“She found one of those war-chariots. She wanted me to harness myself up so that she could ride me,” Saengdao’s tones were soft so that only Yong-Yut could hear her.

Yong-Yut craned her elegant neck to look at her youngest sister.

“What she did was wrong, Saengdao. You were right to be angry. But was she aware about what it means to our people? Did she know those chariots were instruments of shame and torture?”

“Timah was thoughtless as usual. She only had a care about how we would get to see them. She only had a care about herself. As usual.”

“The bunian?”

“Yes.”

Yong-Yut shook her head. “No good will come of her obsession with those folk. They are woven of a thread far finer than our own rude form.”

“I know that. But she’s gone anyway, she says we’re all descended from them, and she means to learn more about our kinship.”

Yong-Yut gave her sister a deliberate look.

“Let me understand this. You let the girl you call your oath-sister go into the forest alone to spy on the bunian princesses, when you know she’s obsessed with them?”

“She brought that war-chariot out. She wanted me to comply with an act that has caused shame and dishonor to our kind for centuries!”

“I know, Yong-Yut. It was a terrible thing to have done, and very thoughtless of her. Still. Do you want something bad to happen to Timah? Really? Of the sort that may happen to her if the garudas capture her?”

Saengdao sighed, and said reluctantly, “No. Not really.”

“So come on then, you can go ahead with considering her unforgiveable after we’ve fished her out of whatever scrape she’s got herself into. You’ve got just cause, don’t get me wrong. But we can’t let her die. Our mother promised her mother, remember?”

“What makes you assume she’s in trouble?” Saengdao countered.

“You’re not with her, and she’s got artifacts she should not be anywhere near. And we both know what Timah can be like.”

Saengdao shook her head and groaned. “Do we have to do this?” she asked in plaintive tones.

“Yes, Saengdao, we really do.”

“I don’t like coming here,” Saengdao said to Yong-Yut the next day as they entered the ruins of the Buried Kingdoms.

“Well, most of us do make our livelihoods from scavenging these ruins, sister. You are now old enough to do the same.”

Yong-Yut beckoned at her to take a left turn as they entered a winding road almost covered by giant ferns.

“However, that is not why I’ve brought you today.”

Yong-Yut pointed at a thatched hut that looked far more spacious than the hut they shared with their siblings. The thatching looked new and elegant.

“Did you build this?”

“Yes! Very slowly, I did. Come inside, I want to show you what I’ve found.”

Saengdao followed Yong-Yut into the hut, which was spacious enough on the inside that Saengdao considered that they should be calling it a house. That was strange enough. Houses were not normal for their people. They were too used to needing to build homes they could quickly dismantle and carry on their broad backs. Building this thatched house within the grounds of the Buried Kingdom was even more terrifying, Saengdao thought.

Yong-Yut lifted what looked like a huge frame off the ground.

“What is that?” Saengdao asked.

“It is a war-kite, used to fire missiles into enemy troops. The Khinnaree used to be deployed in the armies of the Buried Kingdom for that purpose. But there are other uses for these kites.”

“Such as?”

“Haven’t you ever wondered what it would feel like to fly?” Yong-Yut asked her.

Saengdao almost flinched. “Not you too,” she said, tucking her hair behind her ear in a nervous gesture.

“My obsession with flight is not the same as your friend’s. I’m thinking about ways in which we should be able to defend ourselves. And flight is one way. I’ve managed to work out how to get it to work. Take this . . . ”

Saengdao took the war-kite that her sister held out to her, and then watched as Yong-Yut picked up a huge satchel and another war-kite. Both war-kites were enormous and had harnesses attached to them. Saengdao nearly staggered under the kite she held. It was not so much because it was heavy, for it was definitely incredibly light. But the sheer length and width of the wings made the entire contraption difficult to carry.

“Let’s go outside so we can get this to work,” Yong-Yut said.

“But why?”

“So we can find your friend.”

“You just want an excuse to use your new toys. You’re just as bad as her,” Saengdao said. “What about the fact that you want us harnessed into these kites in the same way we were harnessed into the chariots?”

“It’s different, Saengdao. I’ve changed these kites. These weren’t originally used for flying, but the Khinnaree would run with these kites on the ground to aim weapons at the enemy. But look! I’ve turned them into something that can make us fly!”

Yong-Yut worked as she spoke, pulling straps and other bits of scavenged leather out from her satchel, attaching hooks and strange brass buttons and other bits of leather in a crisscross pattern.

“What are you doing?” Saengdao asked.

“Attaching the harnesses for the war-kites to carry us. Patience, sister!”

Yong-Yut had her sister sitting down on a boulder before she strapped her into a harness, which was then attached to the giant, violet-hued war-kite.

Yong-Yut’s excitement was infectious, and Saengdao began to feel a measure of skeptical enthusiasm. “How do you expect these kites to carry us?” she asked. “We have never been able to fly because we are so dense.”

“The same way they used to carry huge weapons of war, except better! Look!”

Yong-Yut passed a rolled up piece of paper to Saengdao who stared at the illustrations they contained.

“Your friend’s people aren’t the only one who can make machinery out of what they’ve scavenged from these ruins, you know.”

“I just never thought we needed to do so. And why use the weapons and designs of our oppressors?”

“There will never come a time when we do not need to do what we are doing right now, sister. We work with what we have. We scavenge, because we were robbed. Now, be brave, the next bit may sound alarming. Stand up please, in the clearing over here.”

Yong-Yut attached what looked like a smaller leather satchel to her war-kite. Taking out a blowtorch, Yong-Yut started turning a dial on the satchel before attaching the blowtorch to a nozzle that jutted out from the satchel. A long jet of flame emerged from the nozzle. The satchel expanded, and a great force suddenly moved the war-kite upward.

“Just remember to keep your limbs relaxed and stay calm. Also, take this!”

Saengdao deftly caught the revved-up rifle that Yong-Yut threw at her and tried to remember to stay calm. It was not easy to do so, given that she was the most easily frightened of all of her sisters.

Yong-Yut’s war-kite was bigger than Timah’s. The satchel with its strange properties of fire and force was also bigger. She held in her hand a large rifle that also seemed equipped with a silver spear.

“I’m calling them propulsion-satchels,” Yong-Yut said, winking at the question in her sister’s face. She pulled Saengdao closer, attaching Saengdao’s harness to her own harness with a strong, woven rope.

“There’s a smaller silver spear attached to the inside of your rifle. Do you remember how to shoot that thing?” she asked, giving Saengdao a cheeky grin.

Saengdao snorted, being the sibling who was the most adept at hunting despite her nervous tendencies. “You know I do, but do we have to resort to violence?”

“Hopefully not, but it is good to be prepared.”

“Come on, Saengdao. We shouldn’t waste time.”

Yong-Yut pulled down her goggles to cover her eyes, and Saengdao did the same for her own pair.

The Empress’ wooden palace in the sky was the largest amongst all of the floating palaces, and naturally the grandest. Gold inlayed every wood-carved detail of her palace, and the ladders were studded with rubies and chalcedony. The Empress herself sat on a throne that was set so high in the throne room that thirty-six steps curved upward to meet her feet, clad in slippers of gold and jade.

Timah gazed upon the Empress in awe, wondering if this was the last sight of grandeur she would be granted before they ended her sad life. If so, she was glad to die, she thought. Her dearest wish had been fulfilled. The Empress laughed, and it was not a kind sound.

“I am assuming this is one of the little spies who kept returning to watch us. Of what race is this one, First Admiral?”

First Admiral was a woman dressed in a simple outfit of teal cotton trimmed with silver and teal songket. She circled the kneeling Timah and then answered.

“Of Malay-Thai extraction, descended from the apsaras of the Buried Kingdoms. She is one of our very distant kin, Your Imperial Majesty.”

“One of the little ones we rescued from those accursed Kings?”

“Yes, Your Imperial Majesty.”

“They know our rules, and they know the price for our rules. She was caught spying. Shall we behead her, or shall we claim her as tithe?”

Timah bit down hard on her lower lip so as not to embarrass herself with pleas.

First Admiral paused to look down at her. “She is not without competence, this one, Your Imperial Majesty. We may be in need of more tinkers in the time to come.”

The Empress exhaled. It was a long, tired sound.

“You think we have come to this? Recruiting human tinkers?”

“It’s worth a try, Your Majesty. We need to protect our palaces beyond what we’ve been doing. The empire of the air grows larger, and our people are no longer united as they once were.”

Curiosity overcame Timah despite her fear. She asked, “Your Imperial Majesty, I am not fit to kiss the ground beneath your dais, let alone breathe the air you breathe, let alone speak, but may I know why the bunian are at war?”

The Empress laughed again, this time a sound of shocked amusement.

“So, not fit to breathe the air we breathe, but daring to question our actions? So very insincere, little one.”

First Admiral glanced at Timah before looking up at the Empress, “Your Imperial Majesty, perhaps it would be good if her folk knew of what was going on. This impacts them as well. They are, after all, our kin.”

The Empress made a dismissive gesture with her hand.

“Tell her then. It makes no difference what these diluted by-blows know.”

First Admiral bowed in graceful and profound respect.

“We are not at war, little apsara. But there is a battle happening to determine which of the princesses will be the next Empress.”

Timah did not understand. The Empress barely looked older than Timah. The Empress met her eyes, a small smile playing about her regal lips.

“We do not serve as Empress forever, little apsara. After every decade, a contest happens to determine who serves next. This year, things have become rather strained.”

“Her Imperial Majesty’s daughter won the contest this year. The other princesses claim it was foul play because an engineer died during the contest. They have now mobilized in opposing camps to determine the next Empress,” First Admiral said.

Timah looked up at the Empress, suddenly realizing that the Empress was very possibly on the losing side of this battle.

“Why would they call foul?”

The Empress shrugged. “It was a technicality. It is not the first time such a thing has happened in our history. Not the first time an engineer has died, even. The violence with which these claims were made, however, is something new. We are growing more dependent on engineering. There was a time when we lived only on the power of sakti, but our connection to sakti grows weak. The world outside of kayangan grows stronger.”

Timah said, “Your Imperial Majesty, this unworthy being would be pleased to serve and help you in any way at all in this battle.”

The Empress shook her head slightly, frowning.

“What can you do, little apsara? You’re but a tinker.”

Timah was about to answer when a commotion broke out. She turned to look and saw six armed women bring forward Saengdao and Yong-Yut. They were harnessed to enormous kites that were dragging behind them. They struggled, their faces red, and their necks expanding in an alarming way. The sisters tried repeatedly to claw at the eyes of the bunian guards who pinioned their arms.

“First apsaras, and now the Khinnaree? Are we to have the entire raggle-taggle survivors of the Buried Kingdom up here in my throne room? Captain Misha, what is the meaning of this?”

“We found these two Khinnaree harnessed to armed war-kites that flew faster than our garuda, Your Imperial Majesty. We managed to overtake them when the winds slowed, and just before their machines died.”

“The propulsion-satchels lost power as we gained altitude,” Yong-Yut said to no one in particular, sounding incredibly disgruntled.

“Khinnaree mechanics and apsara tinkers,” the Empress said, her tone thoughtful, “I am going to need help to understand how such a strange event can come to pass. It is an anomaly, but may be fortuitous.”

The Empress’ thoughtful tone came hand in hand with a shining luminescence in her form, which grew until she was an oval of light that hurt the eyes. Timah immediately turned the dial on her goggles to compensate for the light-blindness. She gasped at what she saw.

The oval of light seemed to split itself. A bird that seemed to be made of both air and light emerged from the Empress’ form. It floated above the Empress in a delicate way, its movements soft and deliberate. The peace it brought filled everyone in the room.

“Holy Jentayu,” the Empress said, in a soft, reverent voice, “Give us guidance in this matter. Should we take these children as tithe or should we sacrifice them?”

The bird flew down from the throne, coming face-to-face with Timah. The bird was so beautiful that Timah could not bear to look full into the soft brown eyes that fiercely looked into hers. The bird then flew above her, almost gliding in the air, before it reached the two Khinnaree sisters, circling them.

Timah did not understand the ways of the Khinnaree, but she knew she had angered and hurt Saengdao. She wondered if the Jentayu would know of this. If so, would she be punished?

The Jentayu flew back to the Empress. The two of them merged in a brilliant ball of blue light that hurt Timah’s eyes even through her light-blindness setting. She closed her eyes and kept them closed.

It felt like a very long while before the Empress spoke. The entire room had descended into a reverent silence. It felt as though even the air had been sleeping until the Empress’ voice woke them up again.

“You two Khinnaree, come closer. Tell me of how you changed these war-kites.”

“I found close to two hundred war-kites in one of the armories in the Buried Kingdom, Your Imperial Majesty. I took two of them to work on. I also found the old engineering rooms of the Buried Kingdoms, where they combined minerals and gases to create fluids that could move objects across space. There were many diagrams in the engineering archives that gave instructions. I merely connected that design to the design of the war-kites so that I could fly,” Yong-Yut said, obviously trying to sound nonchalant. However, her eyes were almost shining with the pleasure of sharing what she had achieved.

“That was very ingenious of you, young Khinnaree. However, it is clear that your mechanical work needs refining. You had the speed, but not the lasting power. The lasting power is that of sakti, which has been keeping our palaces afloat.”

The Empress’ expression was inscrutable as she continued, “However, as sakti grows weak, technology must grow strong and evolve. These three denizens of the villages below will be useful in my daughter’s battle.”

First Admiral nodded, her eyes pleased at the Empress’ decision. Timah slumped in relief.

On her throne, the Empress surveyed her court with troubled eyes.

She spoke, “The Jentayu also said that we must consider these apsaras and Khinnaree as potential candidates for our future armies. She says that we must unite against a common danger in the future. We cannot merely be a city of bunian any longer. As the world outside of our kingdoms grows, our forests and our dominions will decrease. We will need to fortify ourselves.”

Timah wondered what that common danger could be, but she was too overcome with relief to dwell too long on the subject, too overcome to notice the sounds of anger and conflict that swept over the close to two hundred bunian that thronged the huge throne-room in the sky.

“Take them away to be outfitted and trained. I am weary and must retire,” said the Empress.

Timah stood up and made to run toward Saengdao. She stopped mid-stride at the cold look Saengdao gave her. Saengdao shook her head and turned away. The two sisters left with the armored guards.

Timah did not even bother to deny the hollow feeling within her. It was a feeling that would be her constant companion ’til the end of her days.

First Admiral had placed both the Khinnaree with an aerial defense engineering unit to be trained, while taking Timah to the floating annex for civilian engineers. One of the pavilions had been converted into a practical workshop, filled with bunian engineers, their elegant limbs encased in overalls made of kain pelekat.

“This is where we work on refining our machines, merging the powers of the elements to create new war-engines and ways to keep our city afloat and invisible,” First Admiral said, “We are trying our best to develop new technology to keep the palaces not just afloat, but to keep them hidden.”

“I do not know how I will ever be useful to beings so much more intelligent than me,” Timah said, self-conscious and shy. She was overcome with the brilliance and competence displayed by the bunian engineers at work. Her eyes hungered for the machines they were building.

“You are here to learn. You are not useful to us, yet. But you will be.” First Admiral said. Her voice was not unkind. “The Empress always looks further into the future than any of us—this is what happens when you are connected to the Holy Jentayu.”

“Am I not here to help with the battle between the Empress’ daughter and the other princesses?”

“That battle was lost before it began, child. Our story is about to change. Yours is only just beginning. Learn, for you will be the future of this Empire. All of you.”

Their food was served on bronze platters so grand that the two Khinnaree were shy.

“Your harnesses brought us to a different world, sister,” Saengdao said to Yong-Yut as they were fed piles of glutinous rice with shredded mango salad.

“Yes, my harnesses worked. But there is much to be done before the war-kites can be made useful in battle. I have much to do with the aerial defense engineering unit.”

Saengdao looked happier and calmer than she had been for a very long time. Nevertheless, her eyes seemed uncertain.

“Will you teach me, sister? I want to help. I am not smart like you, but I can do what needs to be done.”

Yong-Yut laughed. “Not smart, Saengdao? You always think less of yourself than you deserve. Perhaps asking you to be Timah’s nursemaid was not one of Mother’s better decisions. You may well prove to be the smartest of us all, Saengdao. This is a whole new world for us.”

Saengdao nodded her assent, staring at the clouds from the open doors of their floating pavilion. During their flight in the sky, moments before they were apprehended, Saengdao has seen the world stretched out before her and felt the rush of knowing instinctively how to keep the propulsion satchel going. She felt as though the hot rage that had engulfed her had transformed her into a different person. Her mind, so sluggish and ready to take instructions before, had turned into something else.

She was unsure if she knew what that thing was, but she was very sure that she never wanted to be in the vicinity of one who had willingly cast her in a subservient role for most of their life. Some friendships had to die so that some lives could begin.

Timah never saw her home again.

Thirty years later, the floating palaces had twenty war-kite squads of six equipped Khinnaree each, patrolling in shifts to protect the floating palaces, or the parts of the floating palaces to which they were assigned. Internecine wars became a trend amongst the bunian princesses. There were neither Khinnaree nor apsaras left in the villages below. Her bare feet forgot the feel of grass and the sweet dampness of forest herbs. Some days, she still saw the owl-women. One or two of them would fly high enough that they reached the floating palaces before they would be swept away by the wind or captured by the war-kite patrol units.

Timah would see Admiral Saengdao harnessed to her violet war-kite more than once as she patrolled with her sisters, flying in stately aerial formations. Admiral Saengdao’s uniform was a rich lavender songket, adorned with the silver accoutrements of her rank. She laughed as she worked, sounding far more lighthearted than the Khinnaree who had grown up with Timah.

Timah worked on the machines and propulsion satchels pioneered by Admiral Yong-Yut at the Avian Defense Engineering Unit for civil engineering purposes, keeping their homes afloat and equipped with the wherewithal to stay protected and invisible. The Khinnaree, on the other hand, worked on refining the war-kites so that more Khinnaree could be outfitted. Timah saw the Khinnaree flying past her workshop on a daily basis, harnessed to their war-kites.

Timah was kept mostly to her workshop when she was not summoned to court for new directives from the next two Empresses who came into power after the Empress who had taken her in had been murdered in her sleep by her daughter’s rivals.

The war-chariots of the past were never spoken of again. Arch-Admiral Yong-Yut had ordered for the immediate destruction of any war-chariot found in the ruins of the Buried Kingdom.

They remained only to haunt Timah in her dreams and in her moonlit vigils against the demons of self-defeat.

About the Author

Nin Harris is an author, poet, critical theorist and Gothic scholar who exists in a perpetual state of unheimlich. Nin writes Gothic fiction, baroque planetary romances and space operas, mythic fantasies and various other forms of hyphenated weird fiction. Nin’s publishing credits include: Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, The Dark, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, etc. Nin was a 2016 Rhysling Poetry Award nominee.

The Book Reader

Keishi Kajifune, translated by Toshiya Kamei

Outside the window, a large whale swims, or rather floats, in the clear, early-summer sky.

As its disproportionately huge eyes turn toward me, the whale’s body becomes tinted eerily dark red, and its flesh starts dripping.

I gaze around the white-walled physics classroom. The digital textbook remains open on my tablet, still showing today’s lesson.

An infinite number of ants crawl up my hands on the desk—or so I feel. When I blink a few times, they’re gone without a trace.

The class is thrown into chaos. Some girls get up and scream. Terrified cries fill the room.

The teacher, a young man in his twenties, writhes about on the floor, screaming in agony.

An explosion thunders afar, followed by a booming roar.

“Rumi, come with me!”

I turn in the direction of the voice. It’s Miina. She grabs my arm and pulls me hard.

I follow her as she drags me along.

As I feel her grip on my arm, we dash through the long hallway in the midst of utter confusion. We run up the stairs everyone stays away from.

“Where are we going?”

“A safe place,” Miina answers. “Away from everybody else.”

Monitors are everywhere at our school, keeping tabs on us in the name of security.

Miina leads me toward the rooftop. When she hurls herself against the entrance door, it opens without much resistance.

We catch our breath in a shower of early-summer sunlight. A clean, monotonous townscape spreads in all directions.

“That’s the only way in.” She points her chin toward the door. “And out.”

A flame rises in the downtown area. I cower, startled.

“What is it?” Miina asks.

“An explosion . . . ”

“Is that so? It’s all illusion—triggered by the nanobots.”

Miina has a special ability.

She can read physical books.

“I’ve got something to show you.” Miina handed me a book in her dorm room. “Open it,” she added.

As I flipped through the book, rubbing the print-filled pages with my fingers, the letters danced before my eyes.

For a while, I followed the sentences with my eyes, but I eventually got lost in them. I had never read a printed book before. My head throbbed lightly.

“You can’t read, can you?” she said, as if surprised.

I shot her a resentful glance.

“I can,” she said and described what the book contained.

“The human brain feels threatened when another person suffers less or gains something. That characteristic has survived to this day because it has aided the survival of humanity. In other words, when necessities were scarce, when food and shelter were limited, humans had to take it from someone else in order to get something.”

“Sounds a lot like the definition of the word ‘jealousy,’” I said.

“You’ve got that right, Rumi.”

I first saw Miina among the incoming freshmen who lined up in front of the immaculate first aid room where we regularly have learning nanobots administered. As I impatiently waited for my turn, the sound of cheerful laughter reached my ears. As I looked up, a short-haired tomboy caught my eye. She was the center of attention, chatting with other girls. She struck me as my exact opposite.

Then she stepped closer and talked to me.

We began with exchanging names, but the rest is all a blur to me now, except for one thing that I wondered—What does someone like her want from me?

That’s how I met Miina.

Before long, I began spending lots of time in Miina’s dorm room.

“I don’t remember my mother’s face,” I confided in her one day.

She listened to me attentively while she lay in her bed. When I was done, she rolled over, pulled up her sleeve, and showed me the inner part of her arm.

“Look,” she said, pointing to several severe bruises. “They’ve tried to harvest my bone marrow cells.”

I gasped.

“I’m immune to the nanobots. They want to transfer this immunity to others. The military.”

“The military?”

“The psychological forces,” she lowered her voice. “Just don’t tell anyone, okay?”

By this time, we had grown close to each other and shared each other’s secrets.

“I’m different. I can read physical books. But because I’m different, the military practically owns me.”

Although I neglected to tell Miina, my father serves as an officer in the psychological forces. When I went home for the winter holidays, I brought up some questions.

“Do the nanobots ever fail to affect some people?” I asked.

“Just between us,” he began, with a half-empty glass of whisky in his hand, relaxing on the couch in the living room. “Some of us aren’t affected by the nanobots. They’ve got a special immune system that expels the nanobots when they enter their bodies. What do you think they’re good for?”

“The military.”

“That’s right. We now employ the nanobots as a means of psychological warfare. We scatter them in the air to cause mental disorders in our targets. Anyone who’s immune to the nanobots can be an excellent candidate for a soldier or an agent.”

“I’ve got a classmate who can read books. She’s immune to the nanobots given to us at school.”

“A certain percentage of the population possesses that disposition. We keep a huge list of them.”

I gathered that he knew about Miina as he averted his gaze.

“Why do you not want us to read books?” I asked.

“Half-baked imagination will breed hatred,” my father gulped his drink. “There was a time when information wasn’t controlled,” he continued, as if talking to someone afar. “Abundant information existed, more than humanity could process. Back then, humans’ ability to supplement reality with their imagination backfired. Imagination was at fault. That’s why we take away kids’ ability to imagine.”

“What’s that got to do with our ability to read books?”

“Information deemed harmful has been expunged from digital publications, but it may still remain in physical books. If you kids come across the harmful information, you won’t understand it. Above all, we need to protect kids from fiction so that they won’t develop imaginations. After you’re administered the nanobots in school for a few years, your imagination will be diminished for the rest of your life. You’ll need training to understand fiction. Without that training, you won’t be able to develop your imagination.”

The learning nanobots we receive in school are designed to enhance memory as they stimulate the synapses to unite one another. In addition, they affect the prefrontal cortex in our brain and weaken our imagination. They also utilize how our brain reacts to transmitted light and reflected light differently to reduce our ability to understand texts written on paper.

Besides what my father told me, this is pretty much what my online search has yielded. Even so, information is hard to come by due to blunt censorship. My quest for knowledge has repeatedly run aground, as I’ve never been granted full access to the archives.

“I feel lonely sometimes,” Miina mumbles. We’re alone up here on the rooftop. The whole city is drowned in a sea of illusion the nanobots have unleashed.

“Sooner or later, I’ll be alone, away from everyone,” she continues. “But I want someone to remember me and think of me once in a while.”

“Did you get what I asked?” I change the subject. Miina looks surprised for a moment, but she takes a silver-colored cylinder out of her pocket and hands it to me.

“I’ll remember you for the rest of my life, Miina,” I say and stick the tip of the cylinder into the inner part of my arm, taking aim at the vein.

“Are you sure about that, Rumi?”

“You’re asking me now?”

We burst into laughter. Now Miina’s hemopoietic cells roam through my body. One prick of a painless needle does the trick. Thanks to the latest technology, no transplant rejection occurs.

“Do you think you can pilfer your bone marrow cells for me?” I asked her about a month ago.

An enormous dog walks along the street in the distance while it drools. Another bomb explodes in close vicinity. Unaffected by the nanobots, Miina sees or hears none of this while the whole city is under siege. My father said he had been busy at work. The military must have upped the ante.

Miina can imagine and read books.

I want to feel what she feels every day.

About the Author

Keishi Kajifune is a Japanese writer of science fiction. He has authored Security Service Division (2018) and Buso rokitai (2018). In 2020, his story “Hon no yomeru tokubetsu na kanojo” won honorable mention in the first Kaguya SF contest organized by VirtualGorilla+.

“The Moon’s a Balloon”:
Hot Air Balloons and Airships in Speculative Fiction

Carrie Sessarego

People have always dreamed of flight. With the invention of the hot air balloon (specifically, the Montgolfier balloon, which is essentially the same design one might see at hot air balloon festivals today) this dream became a possibility for a startling variety of people—aristocrats and scientists, entertainers and artists, men and women. The popularity of hot air balloons and their offspring, dirigibles, left a permanent mark on speculative fiction from their first appearance in the skies through the modern era.

For modern Europe and America, hot air ballooning became a craze when the Montgolfier brothers (Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne) created a balloon that utilized a large envelope made from silk (specifically, taffeta) with an optional attached basket. The Montgolfier envelope was a bag that looked like an inverted teardrop with an opening at the bottom. Modern balloons can have any envelope shape, but the classic Montgolfier teardrop shape is still the most popular. To this day, most recreational balloons have the same three parts as the first Montgolfier balloons, albeit using different materials—the envelope, the basket, and the burner, which heats the air that inflates the balloon and causes it to rise.

On September 19, 1783, the Montgolfiers sent up a balloon manned by a sheep, a duck, and a rooster. The balloon and its passengers landed safely, so on October 15, 1783, they sent up chemistry and physics teacher Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier on a tethered flight. On November 21, the first manned untethered flight took off (crewed by Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes). Balloonmania was on, and scientists, artists, and the general public remained fascinated by balloons well through the Victorian era.

People in Regency Europe, especially in France and England, were captivated by hot air balloons. Once people learned how a hot air balloon worked, many people built their own balloons and gave exhibition flights at fairs and other events, often using highly flammable hydrogen gas for fuel. Balloons filled with hydrogen or helium are “gas” rather than “hot air” balloons, but colloquially they are usually called “hot air balloons,” and I will continue to do so despite the technical inaccuracy.

Scientists explored the skies, adventurers set travel records, and entertainers captivated crowds by jumping out of balloons and parachuting to the ground. For a time, clothing, hairstyles, and anything that could be painted were modeled after or decorated with balloons. Naturally, ballooning sailed into literature as well, and continued to be a craze well past the Victorian period.

Ballooning was popular largely because it was rare enough to be exciting and common enough to be just barely accessible—not only to aristocrats and to men—but also to working-class men and women. Exhibition ballooning quickly became a feature at county fairs, where not only could huge audiences see the balloon launch, but also a working-class person stood a chance of buying, winning, or volunteering for a ride. A working-class family could even put together enough capital to build their own balloon and stage exhibition flights for income. It took less than a year for the first woman to go in an untethered balloon (Élisabeth Thible) and countless women followed, as passengers, pilots, and parachutists.

Balloonists wrote accounts of their travels that were both scientific and adventurous, poetic and factual. Perhaps the first work of prose fiction about ballooning was a lovely work of fantasy written by 1802 by Jeanne-Geneviève Labrosse. She was the first woman to jump from a balloon and descend by parachute. As part of her act, she sometimes tossed her cat out of the balloon with a parachute as well. In response to concerned cat lovers, Madame Garnerin’s cat sent a letter to the press describing his intense love of parachuting. This was only natural, since he had, he stated, “been nursed in the very bosom of aerostation.”

Meanwhile, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote “To a Balloon” and created his own sky lanterns, which bore copies of his essay the “Declaration of Rights.” Scientists and poets alike, including Benjamin Franklin, Erasmus Darwin, and Victor Hugo, wrote of the possibilities of ballooning with a breadth of imagination that bridged the gap between science, scientific romance, and science fiction. The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen, first written by Rudolf Erich Raspe in 1785, had several editions, translators, and publishers, each of whom added more and more adventures. In the versions published between 1809 and 1895, the Baron had all manner of balloon-related adventures, including lifting and relocating buildings for his amusement.

As the Regency era transformed into the Victorian, writers used the concept of hot air ballooning to suggest new possibilities in travel, war, science, and adventure. In the tangled world of publishing, many authors played with similar ideas about balloon travel, some more than once. Edgar Allan Poe published a short story “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” about a man who travels to the moon in a balloon. Subsequently, Poe’s publisher allegedly plagiarized Poe’s story for his own story, “The Great Moon Hoax.” Poe raised the stakes by launching “The Balloon-Hoax,” in which he convinced readers of The New York Sun that a fictional character named Monck Mason traveled across the Atlantic Ocean in only three days.

Jules Verne borrowed many elements from Poe and referred to “The Balloon-Hoax” in his own book, From the Earth to the Moon. He also turned to a hot air balloon as the main means of conveyance for Five Weeks in a Balloon, or, A Journey of Discovery by Three Englishmen in Africa. This book, though only barely science fiction (the balloon is altered so that it can make long voyages), set the tone for Verne’s subsequent Extraordinary Voyages books.

Incidentally, Verne’s traveler Phileas Fogg does NOT use a hot air balloon in the book version of Around the World in Eighty Days. In the novel, Fogg travels by rail, boats (mostly steamers), an elephant, and a wind-powered sledge. The balloon was introduced to the story by the 1956 film adaptation and became so popular that it is the first thing most people think of when they hear the book’s title!

Balloon pilots use their knowledge of air currents for navigation, and skilled pilots can catch different wind currents with surprising precision. However, balloons do not have steering mechanisms. Ballooning changed radically in the 1950s when Ed Yost discovered that balloons could carry their own fuel. Previously, balloons were tethered and the air inside heated, then the balloon was released. The balloon could descend by letting the heated air out, but once that heated air was gone, it could not be replaced until the balloon landed. Yost used kerosene and then propane to heat the air while in flight. Should you go on a recreational balloon flight, the balloon will most likely have a propane burner on board, which allows balloons to descend and then reascend, which allows for longer flights.

Hot air balloons were eclipsed by airplanes after the Wright Brothers’ flight in 1903. However, it was by no means settled that the future of the air would belong to airplanes. Dirigibles (often called airships) consisted of an envelope, sometimes with a metal frame inside the envelope, along with passenger and/or cargo compartments and an engine and steering mechanisms. They were able to rise into the sky by using hydrogen or helium gasses.

The most famous dirigibles were built by the Zeppelin company in Germany. Their aircraft were, conveniently, called “Zeppelins,” and sometimes the word was and is used to describe any dirigible with a rigid framework. German Zeppelins bombed Paris and London in WWI. After WWI, passengers took luxurious flights around Europe and from Europe to America aboard the craft. The Graf Zeppelin circumnavigated the globe in 1929. Beginning in 1933, Hitler turned the German dirigibles into a symbol of rising Nazi power. The golden age of Zeppelins and dirigibles ended with the famous Hindenburg disaster of May 6, 1937.

Thanks to the steampunk genre, dirigibles thrive in literature today. Inspired by Victorian writers H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, steampunk explores the possibilities of alternate histories in which Victorian fashion prevails, steam as an energy source was not replaced by electricity or gasoline, and dirigibles rule the sky.

It’s difficult to find any steampunk that DOESN’T feature dirigibles, but a few that do demand special mention. In real history, the Union used hot air balloons to spy on the Confederates. In Cherie Priest’s Clementine, dirigibles carry troops, supplies, and spies in a version of the American Civil War that seems unending. The Guns Above, by Robyn Bennis, fictionalizes the Crimean War, pitting fictional countries against each other with dirigibles battling ground forces as well as each other. This book is notable for its attention to technical detail and realism within an alternate history framework.

The His Dark Materials series, by Philip Pullman, uses airships not only for practical purposes, but to reveal class and character. While the rich travel in dirigibles with luxury and precision, drifting and scrappy Lee Scoresby scrapes up a living with the hot air balloon he won in a poker game. Similarly, Gail Carriger’s Finishing Schoolseries uses airships to denote the function and social class of its characters. It is set in an alternate-history Victorian school that is located in a dirigible. The mobile quality of the school allows its unusual students to participate in a large array of social functions as well as espionage and assassination activities. Teachers and their posh students live on the higher levels of an airship, but heroine Sophronia quickly explores the lower levels and makes friends with the laborers who work and live there.

No discussion of hot air ballooning in literature can be complete without a mention of the childhood classic, The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pène du Bois, first published in 1947. In this book, balloons both hearken back to a pre-WWII way of life and forward to one of space age invention.

The story is narrated by Professor William Sherman, who builds a balloon with the hope of spending time away from all other people. He crash lands on Krakatoa only a few days before the famous 1883 explosion, where he discovers a secret community of Americans who live in immense comfort and cooperation due to their discovery of diamond mines.

The imagery of life on Krakatoa Island, where the books’ characters reside, is redolent of colonialism, without the ethical violations of real colonialism, since the characters live on a previously uninhabited and unowned island. The lifestyle and manners of the characters are similar to those of the Edwardian upper class, but without the snobbery, as most of these characters are working-class people. The narrator’s balloon allows him to travel to a dreamy, pure, languorous existence.

Yet, the inhabitants of Krakatoa delight in invention, especially in experimenting with electricity. And their clever, innovative balloon platform is what allows them to survive the events of the novel, bearing them inexorably into modern life. This tension between leisure and rush, a nostalgia for the past and a push for cutting edge technology, is typical of the history and the present reality of ballooning, which is currently split between gentle recreation and daring feats in the stratosphere.

Today the fictions and adventures of ballooning continue unabated. No one has traveled to the moon in a balloon, but people have traveled to and parachuted from the stratosphere, and a joint project of NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) hopes to send a balloon to explore Titan, one of Saturn’s moons. Balloon hoaxes are still a thing, as seen in the case of the “Balloon Boy” hoax of 2009, in which a family claimed to have accidentally sent their young son up in a balloon. (He was found hiding in his own attic after a long and extensive search.) Even cats are still taking part in ballooning and parachuting in both factual instances and a wide variety of Internet hoaxes.

I had the opportunity to take a hot air balloon ride in Napa, California in the early summer of 2020, and I can truly say I’ve never experienced anything like it. I felt safe in a way I have never felt before. I felt both calm and exhilarated. I cannot explain why the sensation of flight in a basket should be so thrilling, yet totally devoid of terror. I can only say that when the ride ended, all I wanted was to do it again. It is no surprise to me that these craft and their airship cousins thrive in the world of speculative fiction. The basket of a balloon in flight is a place where poetry and science, fate and decision, adventure and peacefulness meet.

About the Author

Carrie Sessarego is the resident “geek reviewer” for Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, where she wrangles science fiction, fantasy romance, comics, movies, and non-fiction. Carrie’s first book, Pride, Prejudice, and Popcorn: TV and Film Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre, was released in 2014. Her work has been published in Interfictions Online, Pop Matters: After the Avengers, The WisCon Chronicles Vol. 9, Invisible 3, Clarkesworld Magazine, and two volumes of Speculative Fiction: The Year’s Best Online Reviews, Essays and Commentary. She spends her time wrangling her husband, daughter, dog, and three cats.

Dinosaurs and Metaphors:
A Conversation with Sheila Williams

Arley Sorg

Born in Springfield, MA, Sheila Williams grew up in a family of five in western Massachusetts. Her mother had a master’s degree in microbiology; her father sparked her interest in genre fiction, reading Edgar Rice Burroughs to her. He had a membership to the Science Fiction Book Club, which delivered books every month. Once the spark caught, she read everything she could get her hands on. At the library she discovered a secret code: the books she loved had spaceships on the spines.

Williams attended Elmira College in upstate New York. She spent a year abroad at the London School of Economics before graduating with a degree in philosophy. She earned her master’s in philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, MO.

In 1981, Williams joined the publishing industry, starting in a subsidiary rights department. In 1982, she became an assistant at Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, where she would work with the eponymous author and editor for ten years. Williams was given more responsibilities in weeks and the managing editor title in three years. In 1992, she cofounded the Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence with Rick Wilber, a project that nurtures emerging authors beyond simply handing them a prize.

She became editor of Asimov’s in 2004 when Gardner Dozois retired. Williams has been a Hugo Award finalist for editing almost every year since 2006 and won in 2011 and 2012. The magazine won Locus Awards in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2016. In 2018, she was given SFWA’s Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award, with Gardner Dozois, “to honor their editing careers in support of science fiction and fantasy.”

Williams has coedited many anthologies, the bulk of them collecting stories from Asimov’s, starting with Tales from Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in 1986 with Cynthia Manson, and including a long line of themed books with Gardner Dozois, such as 1999’s Isaac Asimov’s Werewolves. She edited Why I Left Harry’s All Night Hamburgers and Other Stories in 1990 with Charles Ardai and A Woman’s Liberation: A Choice of Futures By and About Women in 2001 with Connie Willis.

Solo projects include Hugo and Nebula Award Winners from Asimov’s Science Fiction in 1995, Asimov’s Science Fiction: 30th Anniversary Anthology in 2007, and Enter a Future: Fantastic Tales from Asimov’s Science Fiction in 2010.

Most recently, she’s spent time helping to arrange poetry readings for high school students at a local Barnes & Noble. “Some of the kids are nervous,” Williams says, “but I think they all benefit from having a real author’s reading experience. It’s wonderful to see how supportive they are of each other.”

You once told me, “I love dinosaur stories!” Are there certain elements or aspects or things that the stories you love the most have in common? Or does it vary greatly depending on the story?

I love many different kinds of stories. I do love dinosaur stories, but I also use the word as a metaphor. The “dinosaur” represents the fantastic element, be it scientific, surreal, or supernatural. I’ve read many New Yorker stories, but they don’t tend to be among my favorites. (There are exceptions, but these tend to be tales like George Saunders’ “Escape from Spiderhead.”) A story about a bad marriage, or a pedestrian neighborhood, or a claustrophobic social scene, usually needs an additional fantastic component to resonate with me. An example of this is Dale Bailey’s “Mating Habits of the Late Cretaceous.” This perfect story has everything—a disintegrating marriage and depression, but also time travel and dinosaurs! My favorite stories tend to be told on multiple levels, but they are all different.

Since you took over Asimov’s in 2004, do you feel like there are specific things about your taste in stories that have changed?

I’ve always been open to the next new idea, the next new type of story. It’s not so much that my tastes have changed as it is that authors and their fiction are influenced by their perspectives and by changing events. New authors bring new ideas. There’s a deeper appreciation of the diverse backgrounds today’s authors bring to the field. Authors are introducing a host of fresh ideas, new storytelling techniques, new characters, new worlds.

I’m enjoying all of it. I loved what I was buying in 2004, but I wouldn’t want to be buying the exact same material sixteen years later. Even the authors who were being published in 2004 have grown and changed, and their fiction has evolved as well. My November/December holiday cover story by Sam Schreiber (“Christmas at the Hilbert Astoria”) is probably a bit zanier than something I might have published in 2005, but it contains a lot of complex math and physics and pairs well with my new Christmas story from Connie Willis (“Take a Look at the Five and Ten”). The issue also has stories by Alaya Dawn Johnson, Chen Qiufan, Julie Novakova, and lots of other recognizable names. No two are alike!

Even before you took over Asimov’s you had been at Analog for a number of years, and you are part of a science fiction legacy. Do you feel like genre definitions are important, are they relevant? And how do you feel about horror or dark fantasy?

I think it’s still important that there is a form of literature that explores the effects of science and technology on our culture and looks to their effects on the future. This is a rich vein that continually gives to authors as new advancements and discoveries occur in the STEM disciplines. It is the sort of fiction that I wanted for Entanglements. Entanglements may be the first book in the Twelve Tomorrows series to address a specific theme, but all the fiction in these books has been hard science fiction. I publish stories like this in Asimov’s, but I’m also delighted when the lines between science fiction and fantasy and horror blur. There is a lot of room for experimentation and the blending of ideas among these related fields.

How did the Entanglements project come about; how did it develop, and why “Entanglements” as a specific theme?

Susan Buckley, an acquisitions editor at MIT Press, contacted me late in November 2018 to inquire if I’d be interested in editing the 2020 edition of Twelve Tomorrows. This was to be the first edition with a specific theme. She and Gideon Lichfield of MIT Technology Review had already discussed some options for the theme, but they wanted to reach the final decision with me. I thought the effect of new technology on human relationships was both an intriguing theme and one that was broad enough that authors could approach it in myriad ways.

Did the book turn out pretty much how you’d initially envisioned it? Or are there important differences between initial concept and final product?

The final book is full of surprises, but in the quality of writing and diversity of ideas, it’s exactly what I was hoping for. There’s a range in story length and tone. This range happened organically, but it’s an essential element of an interesting collection of tales.

What was the editorial process like in terms of story selection and/or ToC development?

I submitted a list of twelve to fifteen authors who I knew were capable of tackling Entanglements’ themes in creative ways. A few authors fell off the list because my editors preferred not to have any overlap with authors who had appeared in the 2018 volume of Twelve Tomorrows. A few of the remaining authors were busy with other obligations. This left me with eight authors from the original list. I suggested a couple of new names and Gideon and Susan also made some recommendations. I was extremely happy with the final table of contents.

There were other important aspects that went into the book’s development. I enjoyed working with Xia Jia on her thrilling tale, which was translated from Chinese by Ken Liu. Working closely with both authors gave me deeper insights into “The Monk of Lingyin Temple.”

I had a lot of fun going through loads of art with Susan. Tatiana Plakhova’s work is stunning, thoughtful, and full of entangled connections. I was really pleased that she agreed to be a part of Entanglements.

Personally, one very satisfying aspect of this book was having the opportunity to choose a distinguished science fiction author to profile or interview. Other volumes of TT have featured Neal Stephenson, Samuel R. Delany, and Gene Wolfe. I knew immediately that the author I wanted to fill this role was Nancy Kress. Lisa Yaszek, a professor of science fiction studies at Georgia Tech, whose work I’ve followed for some time, was an excellent interviewer. I felt very lucky that Nancy agreed to write “Invisible People” for the book as well.

Were there stories you really liked that didn’t make it into final selection for one reason or another?

No. This wasn’t an open call for submissions. One author sent two stories and I had a very strong preference for one over the other. Another author offered me a couple of different story scenarios. Both would have been fascinating, but sadly I could only choose one. I did ask for some rewrites and clarifications, but I was very happy with the quality of the material that I received.

In the Introduction you wrote, “The book’s ten fiction authors were asked to write tales about the emotional bonds that hold us together. They had a broad canvas.” What are the advantages to giving authors a broad canvas to work with, and are there also potential disadvantages?

I was afraid that a narrow theme would result in stories that were too similar to each other. A broad theme ensures that that there will be a variety of perspectives. Yet, there were some very interesting, and narrower, themes that I didn’t choose. I’d love to revisit some of these and figure out strategies for making them work.

If someone will read only one story to see if the book is for them, which story would you tell them to read—and why?

One strong feature of an anthology is the range of material. Some stories will appeal to you. Different stories may appeal to someone else. “Sparklybits,” Nick Wolven’s complicated tale about parenting dynamics, tools for virtual education, and concerns about screen time may be the best story for one reader. “Your Boyfriend Experience,” James Patrick Kelly’s story about a sexbot developer, his boyfriend, and the sexbot may be someone else’s favorite. “The Monogamy Hormone,” Annalee Newitz’s often very amusing story about a woman trying to choose between two lovers should charm almost everyone.

Science fiction can challenge readers in different ways. Which story in the anthology challenges the reader the most?

Sam J. Miller’s “The Nation of the Sick” may be the most challenging. There are a million ideas coming at the reader. As we are getting our mind around iterative modeling and floating fungitecture, our understanding of two brothers’ complex relationship also becomes clearer. The epistolary storytelling technique eventually yields the entire picture, but getting there is a great ride.

Science fiction can also be about innovative ideas. When you think about the book from this angle, which stories come to mind?

In addition to technology and ideas mentioned elsewhere here are a few: “Mediation,” Cadwell Turnbull’s deeply moving story about grief and an AI family therapist; “Don’t Mind Me,” Suzanne Palmer’s chilling look at a child-lock device that conveys ultimate parental control; “The Monogamy Hormone,” with Annalee Newitz’s walls painted with bacterial slime to help build the immune system of elementary students; and Mary Robinette Kowal’s robot service animals in “A Little Wisdom” are great examples of innovative ideas about technology’s future effects on all of us.

If you weren’t collecting these pieces for Entanglements, would you have potentially published them in Asimov’s?

Each of these stories could have been published in Asimov’s, although not in the same issue, as the issues aren’t thematic. There’s a brief graphic scene in Rich Larson’s story that might have caused me to waver about whether it was right for Asimov’s. Still, the characters are so humanely drawn and the mix of humor and pathos work so well that there’s a good chance I would have ultimately decided to take it for the magazine.

You’ve edited a number of anthologies before, but the bulk of them are related to Asimov’s. Do you plan to do more anthologies completely separately from the magazine?

Working on this original anthology was challenging and fun. I’d love to do more books like this if the opportunity comes along.

About the Author

Arley Sorg is co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine. A 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, he writes SF/F/H, reviews for Cascadia Subduction Zone Magazine, and is also associate editor at both Locus and Lightspeed magazines.

The Heart of the Story:
A Conversation with Scott H. Andrews

Arley Sorg

Scott H. Andrews has over a dozen electric guitars, half of which he built himself, including one he started building in 2007. But then he launched Beneath Ceaseless Skies in 2008.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies (BCS) is a nonprofit, SFWA-qualifying online magazine dedicated to publishing “literary adventure fantasy: fantasy set in secondary-world or historical paranormal settings, written with a literary focus on the characters.” Within a few years of launch, the magazine was receiving Hugo Awards nominations. In 2013, Andrews received the first of several World Fantasy Award nominations. Since then, the magazine has been a Hugo finalist in the Semiprozine category. In 2016, the magazine won a British Fantasy Award for Best Magazine/Periodical, and Andrews won the World Fantasy Special Award, Non-Professional in 2019. BCS stories have garnered a slew of accolades, including regular appearances on Locus Recommended Reading lists, landing on most major genre awards lists, and being reprinted in notable anthologies.

Andrews has a PhD in biophysical chemistry, which, he says, he only uses “when I see TV chefs getting protein chemistry wrong.” As a teen he was the ecology teacher at his summer camp, where he spent time catching rattlesnakes. Over the years he has identified as chemistry lecturer, musician, woodworker, and connoisseur of stouts. But clearly, his heart was in fiction. Before launching BCS, Andrews graduated from the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2005. In 2006 his piece called, “A Brief Swell of Twilight” won the $1,000 Briar Cliff Review short story prize, and his short story, “Excision” came out in Weird Tales in 2007.

Andrews lives in Virginia with his wife, two cats, overflowing bookcases, and hundreds of beer bottles from all over the world. About that guitar? “It probably won’t get finished until whenever BCS ends.”

In your 2017 Locus Spotlight, you quoted Faulkner. Do you mostly read genre or is your reading habit fairly broad? Was Faulkner a homework assignment, or did you grow up reading a lot of different kinds of books?

I grew up reading a lot, nonfiction too, but the fiction was mostly cool stuff that caught my eye or that I picked up from friends, like Lord of the Rings, Dune, and Earthsea; a lot of spy raid novels like Alistair MacLean; all the James Bond novels; some Heinlein juveniles; some early Stephen King. My mom would take us to the library and turn us loose, which was great. My granddaddy had a bookshelf of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, which I would tear through during family visits; that was my exposure to pulp short fiction.

My literary background comes mostly from the exceptional English classes I had in high school. We read the usual things like Shakespeare and The Great Gatsby, but we also read Crime and Punishment, Madame Bovary, multiple Faulkner novels, All the King’s Men, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Kate Chopin, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Virginia Woolf, Austen, the Brontës, Dickens, Hardy, Forster, Camus, Kafka, Gogol, Ralph Ellison, Bobbie Ann Mason, and García Márquez. It was overwhelming at the time, reading a hundred pages of Dostoevsky on the school bus each afternoon, but later I realized what a transformative experience it had been. I can’t claim to remember it all or understand it, but it gave me a background that I draw on to this day.

My current reading is embarrassingly scant. I’m so swamped with BCS reading these days that I rarely read other stuff. I always try to read all of the award-finalist short fiction pieces every year, and I read on the cell phone when traveling, but of course I haven’t been traveling this year. Some short fiction writers whose work I find brilliant are K.J. Parker, Cat Valente, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Ted Chiang.

What were some of the most influential genre books you read growing up, and how did they impact you?

The most influential fantasy books I read growing up were Lord of the Rings and Raymond E. Feist’s early epic fantasy novels. I read the Earthsea novels too, but they didn’t hit me quite as much as the classic pseudo-northern European medieval fantasy did, maybe because I was interested in Earth history as a kid and I had lived in England for a year and seen northern European castles and ancient ruins up close. Feist’s novels were great epic fantasy page-turners, with fun characters and a world-jeopardizing plot that still had a personal level to it. Lord of the Rings impacted me with the sense of history in it; the sense of past ages of civilization, and the people who had lived them and the works they built and knowledge they kept, and the current nostalgia and wistfulness for those accomplishments—for better or for worse—that were now lost or fallen.

From your years of editing BCS, are there one or two stories that stand out as particularly important or special? Or which exemplify, more than most, what a BCS story is?

For me, core things that “a BCS story” has are an interesting fantasy world, a focus on the characters and their goals and hopes and aches and yearnings, and emotional resonance—something emotionally moving or profound. Two stories that stand out to me are “Laws of Night and Silk” by Seth Dickinson and “Geometries of Belonging” by R.B. Lemberg.

“Laws of Night and Silk” has an elegant and rich literary voice to it, which is a thing that really engages me when it’s done so well that it’s effortless to read, and the conceit of the magic system is that the societies in that world do a hideously cruel thing to their children in order to give them apocalyptic magical power. The protagonist must shepherd such a child in order to fight a war, and her bitter rival is shepherding her own child. It’s epic, fantastical, moving, and haunting.

“Geometries of Belonging” is set in R.B. Lemberg’s Birdverse fantasy world, the same world as multiple of their BCS stories and their new novella from Tachyon, The Four Profound Weaves. The world is deeply rich and developed, with societal structures and a magic system that literalize real-world issues and situations that are profoundly important to R.B., and their passion for those things comes through in the characters and their interactions within those societies.

The protagonist is a bereaved person in a complex relationship who is trying to help a person who’s on the margins of that society, and all that protagonist wants is to belong; to find their place in their complicated life and world. There’s a lot at stake for the other characters and the society, but what made me cry when I read it was the simple core humanity of a person who just wants to find a place to belong. Isn’t that what all of us want? That to me is great literary secondary-world fantasy: a lush and fascinating world that’s commenting on important ideas, inhabited by characters who are achingly human.

One of the things people expect or love about fantasy fiction is worldbuilding. Are there one or two stories that stand out in your mind specifically for their worldbuilding?

For me, the best fantasy worldbuilding is worlds that are cool and awe-inspiring but that are also integral the story; worlds that impact the culture and the characters uniquely. R.B. Lemberg’s Birdverse stories are a great example. Two others that stand out to me are “The Secret of Pogopolis” by Matthew Bey and “Woe and Other Remedies” by Michael Anthony Ashley.

The locale in “The Secret of Pogopolis” is a city that bounces up and down like a giant pogo stick, and this condition has a strong and unique effect on the society and the characters. When the city reaches apogee, characters go to the peak of the city and revel in the moment of weightlessness that only occurs when the city has stopped ascending and is about to descend. When the city approaches perigee, the residents retreat to their homes and brood on special padded sofas that protect them from the impact of the city’s descent halting. It’s a very cool concept, and it affects the society and the characters.

“Woe and Other Remedies” feels to me significantly about the moral bankruptcy of slavery. The nobility in this fantasy society are decadent and selfish and effete, in vivid and exaggerated ways that captivate on the page, but also create a cutting satire. The protagonist is a low-level noble who remains mostly sympathetic as he tries vainly to compete, following the dictates of his society, but only gradually do some catastrophic consequences make him start to realize the horror of what he and his society are doing. The worldbuilding is vivid and creative, but it also makes me squirm as the catastrophe escalates while this portion of the society remains oblivious to the consequences and to their own behavior that caused it.

You have a number of short stories out as well, as a writer, including “Excision” in Weird Tales and “The Halberdier, by Moonlight” in On Spec. You won the 2006 Fiction Award from The Briar Cliff Review—a $1,000 prize—for your short story “A Brief Swell of Twilight.” Do you still write? Has editing impacted or changed the way you write?

I really enjoyed all three of those stories. “Excision” was postwar medicine as a magic system, and “The Halberdier, by Moonlight” did a specific thing with POV shifts that I’ve never seen done elsewhere.

I haven’t written fiction in many years. My writing these days is mostly working up single-session D&D adventures, to be played in three to four hours, which is a lot like a one-act play or flash fiction—there’s a build-up and one major turn. I’m fascinated by the storytelling aspect of DMing a tabletop RPG. The players make decisions based on their characters’ motivation and personality, like characters in fiction, but those decisions affect or even determine the plot, and the DM has to respond to that on the fly and keep the plot unfolding, while also controlling the pacing in real time. It’s a different type of storytelling, but I find it fascinating and a lot of fun.

I think my editing might impact my writing if I were ever able to edit my own words like I’m able to edit other peoples’, but I was never able to see my own work in that way. If I get back to fiction writing someday, I’m curious to see if that will be the case.

Does being a fiction writer give you a different editorial perspective, does it change the way you do things as an editor?

I think being a writer, and a workshop graduate, and the fact that I was only a mid-level writer who never quite broke through, gives me deep insight into what it’s like to be a new or emerging writer submitting to magazines, through the slush pile; hoping to get passed up to the head editor, desperate for any comments, and not understanding why stories didn’t catch on. I was in exactly that situation myself, for years, and I was never able to break through it.

That experience as an emerging writer strongly affected the way I do things as an editor. BCS’s policy of giving personalized comments in every rejection was a direct result of my experiences submitting to pro-rate zines, getting lots of form rejections, and being stunned and confused that my stories weren’t working for them. Giving our personalized comments is a huge amount of work, especially for our slush readers—Kerstin Hall, Deirdre Quirk, Rachel Morris, and Beth Hall—but for us it’s worth it. We often see new or emerging writers whose successive submissions to BCS get closer and closer to what we’re looking for, and who ultimately do sell a story to us.

My experience as an emerging writer also drives me to work with new and emerging writers on rewrite requests or a revise and resubmit, for stories that may have a large problem in my opinion—like, the ending doesn’t work—but that otherwise have an interesting character or world and a strong emotional investment from the author. In my experience, not every new writer’s debut story is going to be perfect or brilliant, but many stories that are very good yet not brilliant still deserve to be published and read, and many writers who may be writing very good stories now are ready to learn from the editorial process and from having an early story of theirs published, and often that publication and experience seems to be a first step for them in developing their career; often the next stories such writers send us are a level better than their first one that we bought, and their cover letter has new credits of stories they’ve since sold to other zines.

In my opinion, our field needs venues that will publish very good stories by new writers, not only brilliant stories by existing writers, because doing that can help more of today’s very good writers develop into tomorrow’s brilliant writers and advance the whole field.

How do you feel about dark fantasy and horror? How do you differentiate between the two, and do you enjoy or publish things with that sort of darker edge?

I personally don’t read much pure horror, but I’m fine with dark fantasy or horror elements in fantasy. I think an easy and semantic distinction would be whether the setting is innately fantastical aside from the horror element.

I do enjoy a darker edge to fantasy when it’s not gratuitous; when it’s essential to the character or the plot, and when it has an emotional significance and an emotional effect on the characters. That sort of horror element for me can have great emotional punch, especially when it’s as horrifying to the characters as it is to the reader. I’ve published some rather horrifying or gory stories, by authors like Greg Kurzawa, Eljay Daly, Mike Allen, and Jesse Bullington, but I’ve published more stories where the fantasy horror feels to me more psychological, by Greg Kurzawa and Mike Allen again.

We see magazines come and go, both in print and digital, and there are those magazines that have been around for decades. You started BCS in 2008. What do you think are the most important factors for magazine survivability; how do you achieve those things?

I think the most important factor for magazine survivability is commitment. Any magazine is going to get deluged with submissions; I think an unflagging commitment to replying in a timely manner, treating all writers with respect no matter their level of experience, publishing on schedule, maintaining consistent quality—basically, being professional in everything the magazine does—is huge in magazine building and maintaining a reputation as a worthy and trusted venue.

I think for indie zines, having workable finances is key for survivability. The financial setup for each zine is different; I think it’s important to have a setup that works for your zine, that’s realistic, and that you have set up well enough in advance that the magazine will be financially stable for at least a year, so that you can use that first year to establish your editorial vision and professional reputation. Fundraising opportunities after that point, like subscriptions or crowdfunding, in my opinion hinge on the magazine having a consistent vision and clear professionalism, which makes readers want to pay money for ebooks or donate or become a crowdfunding backer.

In your 2015 interview with S. C. Flynn you said, “The openings that do hook me seem to have a spark of individuality to them.” Many publications go through massive slush piles and will reject stories on the first page; some editors used to even have a “red line of death.” Are there some fairly common reasons why stories don’t make it out of slush; what does it take to get out of slush at BCS, and what does it take to make the sale?

The most common reason why a story doesn’t make it out of the BCS slush, although this is a bit flip as an answer, is that the story isn’t a BCS story. The complexity underlying that flip answer comes from the question of just what is a BCS story. I and our slush readers, Kerstin, Deirdre, Rachel, and Beth, have a good idea of what is a BCS story, but sometimes writers don’t quite have a handle on that yet. For example, we don’t publish classic-style swords & sorcery or D&D-type fantasy, but we still get sent a lot of it. (Which is why I think that a crucial thing for submitting writers to do is read multiple issues of any magazine that you’re submitting to.)

What it takes to get out of the slush, in my opinion, is a story with voice and/or with heart. The “spark of individuality” I mentioned in that 2015 interview is to me about voice: a story or an author having a voice that feels interesting or unusual in some way, often a subjectivity in the voice. I see a lot of stories that have a very objective voice, which for me can feel like the sterile perspective of a camera or of a character who has no investment, or stories whose voice reads to me very similar to the generic or writerly prose I see in the work of aspiring writers, who’ve absorbed prose tics from the fiction that has influenced them, but haven’t yet developed their own voice.

And heart. For me as a fan of character-centered fiction, I need for a story to move me emotionally. It’s not enough for me for a story to have a sympathetic character in an interesting setting who has a motivation and overcomes obstacles as they pursue their goal; I also need to care. I need the story to make me feel something. If I don’t care or the story doesn’t make me feel something, that story might be mechanically perfect, but it’s not going to engage me.

It’s rare, in my experience, for submission stories to have heart or to move me, and for me, all those stories stand out. Heart or spark is a thing I think new or emerging writers don’t always consider as much as they should. I think that was one of my problems when I was an emerging writer—most of my stories didn’t have heart, and so it didn’t matter that they might have been well put together. I was focused on nuts and bolts like POV and motivation and conflict rather than digging deep for something moving and writing a story that could make the reader cry. My story “Excision” that you mentioned above, which was in Ann VanderMeer’s Weird Tales, I found out years later from Ann that she remembered where she was when she first read it, and it had made her cry. That for me is what a story needs to do in order to stand out and get published. Every submission to BCS that has made me cry, I have bought. :)

When I teach writing classes, like for the Odyssey Workshop, one of my mantras for students and new writers is to dig deep into your own emotional experiences and write something that will make the reader FEEL something. That to me is the key to fiction that will engage readers; that will stand out in the slush pile and get bought and published.

A well-known editor once told me that he felt editorship should last seven years, and that after seven years the editor burns out, they get stuck in their habits, and the work they run gets stale. Do you feel like this applies to you or BCS? Or do you feel like running a magazine is still an endeavor of passion, that it’s still a place of discovery and innovation?

I’ve heard that too, in a talk by Gordon Van Gelder; the shelf life he mentioned was ten years. I definitely think there’s a core of truth in that idea. The commitment of running a magazine, that I mentioned earlier, is huge and incessant and definitely has the risk of burning the editor out.

At the time I heard that point from Gordon, I was in year eight or so of BCS, and his point made me stop and think and consider ways I could deliberately try to avoid getting stuck in my editorial sensibilities or having the work in BCS get stale. To me, the work that ends up in a magazine is a product of what stories the writers are submitting, and that in my opinion gives the editor the opportunity or the resources to keep the work fresh.

But I deliberately started trying to stretch myself out of my regular zone and to open myself to approaches or sensibilities that I had been less open to thus far. I published some stories that weren’t quite as tightly secondary-world setting as any I had published before, and I broadened my sensibilities in some areas of voice and tone that I had previously been a bit more narrow about. Basically, expanding my parameters a bit for what a BCS story is. The readership embraced those stories the same as all the others, and I really enjoyed stretching myself and publishing those great stories, so I’m glad that I heard that idea about editor shelf life, and that it inspired to me to take those actions to prevent BCS getting stale.

At the same time, I do feel that running a magazine is an endeavor of passion, even if you have to take steps to make sure the passion stays strong. For me, there’s always passion in the glee and delight of discovering a gem in the slush, or getting a story by a writer who’s subbed before and this new story is a leveling-up from their previous work. Those for me are the moments as an editor that make me feel alive, and they make editing for me feel very much still a place of discovery.

About the Author

Arley Sorg is co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine. A 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, he writes SF/F/H, reviews for Cascadia Subduction Zone Magazine, and is also associate editor at both Locus and Lightspeed magazines.

Editor’s Desk:
Warning, May Contain Marketing

Neil Clarke

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been editing The Best Science Fiction of the Year anthologies for five years now. Under normal conditions, volume five—covering 2019—would have been published by now, but 2020 has been anything but normal and I fear that it’s not quite done with us yet. But that’s a path I’d rather not look down right now . . .

Recently, my editor at Night Shade Books sent me the new cover for volume five. If the artist’s style looks familiar to you, it might be because Pascal Blanche’s work has graced a few of our covers. As you’d expect, I’m a fan of his work and very pleased that he could be a part of this year’s edition.

As you probably know, I don’t particularly enjoy writing editorials or introductions. It’s a slow and painful process for me. However, the introductions for the last two volumes of The Best Science Fiction of the Year have flowed much more naturally after I made a significant change to my approach. To me, Gardner Dozois’ introductions to his year’s best series were essential reading and included valuable history of the short fiction field. With his passing in 2018, I endeavoured to pick up the torch and merge some of those aspects with the analysis I had already been doing. I made it my own and by doing so, it became a very different experience for me. I’m sure I’ll continue to tweak the formula, but between this and the reader feedback, I’m much more comfortable with the direction it’s heading.

Of course, the real reason to read a “best of” anthology is the stories and 2019 provided some wonderful options from a variety of sources.

“The Painter of Trees” by Suzanne Palmer (Clarkesworld Magazine, June 2019)

“Emergency Skin” by N.K. Jemisin (Amazon Original Stories, September 17, 2019)

“In the Stillness Between the Stars” by Mercurio D. Rivera (Asimov’s Science Fiction, September/October 2019)

“Sympathizer” by Karin Lowachee (Do Not Go Quietly, edited by Jason Sizemore and Lesley Connor)

“Knit Three, Save Four” by Marie Vibbert (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November/December 2019)

“Moonlight” by Cixin Liu (Broken Stars, edited by Ken Liu)

“By The Warmth of Their Calculus” by Tobias S. Buckell (Mission Critical, edited by Jonathan Strahan)

“Deriving Life” by Elizabeth Bear (Tor.com, January 31, 2019)

“The Little Shepherdess” by Gwyneth Jones (Current Futures, edited by Ann VanderMeer)

“Such Thoughts Are Unproductive” by Rebecca Campbell (Clarkesworld Magazine, December 2019)

“The River of Blood and Wine” by Kali Wallace (Asimov’s Science Fiction, November/December 2019)

“One Thousand Beetles in a Jumpsuit” by Dominica Phetteplace (Lightspeed Magazine, August 2019)

“Permafrost” by Alastair Reynolds (Tor.comPublishing)

“The Work of Wolves” by Tegan Moore (Asimov’s Science Fiction, July/August 2019)

“Song Xiuyun” by A Que (Clarkesworld Magazine, October 2019)

“Mother Ocean” by Vandana Singh (Current Futures, edited by Ann VanderMeer)

“Cratered” by Karen Osborne (Future Science Fiction Digest, June 2019)

“The Justified” by Ann Leckie (The Mythic Dream, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe)

“Old Media” by Annalee Newitz (Tor.com, February 20, 2019)

“At the Fall” by Alec Nevala-Lee (Analog Science Fiction and Fact, May/June 2019)

“The Ocean Between the Leaves” by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s Science Fiction, July/August 2019)

“Rescue Party” by Aliette de Bodard (Mission Critical, edited by Jonathan Strahan)

“Close Enough for Jazz” by John Chu (The Mythic Dream, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe)

“On the Shores of Ligeia” by Carolyn Ives Gilman (Lightspeed Magazine, March 2019)

“The Empty Gun” by Yoon Ha Lee (Mission Critical, edited by Jonathan Strahan)

“Kali_Na” by Indrapramit Das (The Mythic Dream, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe)

“Painless” by Rich Larson (Tor.com, April 10, 2019)

“Give the Family My Love” by A.T. Greenblatt (Clarkesworld Magazine, February 2019)

And of course, there are always the stories I couldn’t get or wouldn’t fit in an anthology like this. You’ll find the best of those listed in the recommended reading list at the end of the anthology . . . because you can never have too many good stories to read.

Anyhow, I couldn’t think of a better way to follow up last month’s editorial on the value of short fiction than with an anthology that I think makes the case. And yes, I have a vested interest in my own anthology, but I made sure you could easily track down the stories on your own if you decided to detour around it. Oh and the anthology, it’s available in hardcover, trade paperback, and ebook editions. So far as I can tell, it’s the only “year’s best” anthology available in hardcover this year. Ok, ok, I’m done now.

Go read some stories!

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine and Forever Magazine; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a eight-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). His anthologies include Upgraded, Galactic Empires, More Human Than Human, Touchable Unreality, The Final Frontier, Not One of Us, The Eagle has Landed, and the Best Science Fiction of the Years series. His next anthology, The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 5, will be published later this year by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two sons.

Cover Art: 51

Rodion Shaldo

About the Artist

Rodion Shaldo is an artist from Tomsk, Russia. He originally studied architecture, but at age 21, he decided to pursue his life-long love of painting. His main passion is bizarre robots discovering the post-human world and he always tries to find some distinctive pieces of human legacy to include in his work. His robots’ design has been inspired by antique heritage and modern mechanics. He conveys both a knowledge of history and aesthetic feelings through his art. For him, those are the keys to happiness and our future.